Government

James Comey Is Back, And The Media's Got Another Craven Effort To Blame Him For Their Screwups

Few things are more frustrating than blaming Comey for the media's failure to understand the basics of a criminal investigation.

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James Comey (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)

Liberal partisans like to play up the idea that James Comey “cost” Hillary Clinton the presidential election when he “reopened” the investigation of her emails days before the election. To some, this has become an article of faith, the lone bit of scaffolding upon which they can make sense of November. The media has pitched in through op-eds and data science experiments to conclusively fix the blame on Comey. And within hours of the details of Comey’s book hitting the news, media personalities on Twitter started racking up the retweets by dragging Comey through the mud over the election.

But there’s a reason the media is so eager to characterize Comey’s October letter to Congress as “indefensible.” Whether they fully grasp it or not, media personalities know they have to fix the blame on Comey or someone is going to start pointing out that if anyone “cost” Clinton an election, it was the unconscionably irresponsible legal reporting they disseminated in the closing days of the election. Full stop.

As I pointed out at the time, writing this letter was a necessary step in light of Comey’s unorthodox decision in July to publicly announce that there was no basis for a criminal case against Clinton. Whether Comey should have stuck to FBI protocol and held his tongue in July and allowed another three-and-a-half months of unhinged email speculation to rule the news cycle is another question, but once he took that step and gave Clinton an open lane, he locked himself into guaranteeing that he’d looked at everything and come up empty.

This also, as an aside, is the answer to the tag along argument that Comey’s real sin was announcing a review of Clinton’s emails without also announcing that the FBI had an ongoing investigation into Team Trump’s Russian connections. This is an almost laughable conclusion. First of all, Comey didn’t “announce” anything. He wrote a letter to a congressional committee to functionally amend his testimony and the GOP members of the committee leaked this to the world. But more importantly, we have indictments of high-profile figures in this matter because they bumbled along not knowing they were under investigation. Key events in the case against Michael Flynn didn’t even happen until after the election. Clinton’s email probe was already a public story, but Trump’s involvement with Russia was, at least for some team members, a secret conspiracy. The FBI shouldn’t be in the business of announcing to conspirators that they’re under investigation.

Here’s a question: have you ever actually read the October Comey letter? You’ve certainly read and heard a lot about it, but have you looked at what it actually says? Because this is the October Comey letter. That is seriously all he said in a letter written directly to a limited audience of legislators. Given the high risk of a leak that these emails existed and had not been reviewed, Comey’s entirely measured and balanced letter just sought to place this development in its properly insignificant context. Anyone who’s ever gotten a letter from the FBI knows this is the “this is probably nothing, but we have to be thorough” letter.

Which brings us to the media. Once they got tipped about this from Republican lawmakers, did they bring non-partisan seasoned former prosecutors and federal practice defense attorneys on television to interpret the letter? Did they consult with a bevy of experts and relegate the story to the back pages where it, in context, belonged? Certainly not! The media’s fascination with the warped idea that “objective” truth requires letting liberals and conservatives yell for equal time meant every Republican hack with freshly drafted talking points bombarded the public with baseless claims that Comey had “reopened” the case to search “previously unseen” emails. It turned into a circus. The media had a responsibility to point out that, based on Comey’s actions, was patently false and to shut down that misinformation pipeline before it got rolling. They didn’t.

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Sadly, the liberal wing of the talking head echo chamber didn’t help themselves either. When the media insisted on talking to vapid token mouthpieces from the right, the liberals took the bait and swallowed the hook. Comey was “sabotaging” the election they said, accepting the conservative lie that there was anything about this letter to suggest that Clinton was any more blameworthy in October than she’d been in July.

Three days after the Comey letter, well before we reached the inevitably anticlimactic end of the FBI’s review, I laid out what I thought should be the appropriate Democratic response:

The right answer from Clinton supporters should be “we respect Director Comey’s obligation to review any additional emails that come to light. After his office’s comprehensive review of tens of thousands of emails and his conclusion that nothing warranted prosecution, we’re confident that the FBI will quickly conclude that this small number of unreviewed emails will do nothing to change his professional opinion.”

Not only did this proposed response have the benefit of being a one-hundred percent accurate prediction of how the review would play out, but it also didn’t involve actively undermining Comey’s credibility. By the time he announced another all-clear, every public-facing Clinton supporter had already spent a week calling Comey a partisan hack who couldn’t be trusted. They’d managed to do as much damage to Clinton’s innocence as the Republicans by turning the public perception of the FBI’s review into an untrustworthy, conspiratorial mess.

And cheering all of this one was a news media more concerned with impeccably framed conflict over campaign talking points than acquiring actual expertise. We were all out there in October ready to explain why this wasn’t half the story the Republicans desperately wanted it to be.

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So the next time you hear or read some media personality suggest that Comey cost Clinton the election, kindly direct them to take a long look in the mirror and consider what they can do to prevent this kind of disinformation storm in the future. Because, unfortunately, I don’t think the media learned a damn thing from the October Comey letter and I’m pretty sure their reporting structure will repeat the whole debacle all over again.

(The October Comey letter in on the next page for those who haven’t read it.)

Earlier: Hey Liberals: Stop Attacking James Comey Because It Just Makes You Look Stupid

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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