 |
James Comey’s Fear of Everyone—Except Democrats—Helped Donald Trump Upset Hillary Clinton.
Everyone spent the weekend talking about the big New York Times James Comey piece, an informative (and infuriating) tick-tock about what was going through the FBI director’s head last year as he said what he said about Hillary Clinton—and didn’t say what he didn’t say about Donald Trump.
________________________________________________
Mr. Comey made those decisions with the supreme self-confidence of a former prosecutor who, in a distinguished career, has cultivated a reputation for what supporters see as fierce independence, and detractors view as media-savvy arrogance.The Times found that this go-it-alone strategy was shaped by his distrust of senior officials at the Justice Department, who he and other F.B.I. officials felt had provided Mrs. Clinton with political cover. The distrust extended to his boss, Loretta E. Lynch, the attorney general, who Mr. Comey believed had subtly helped play down the Clinton investigation.
CreditChip Somodevilla/Getty Images
-----
Mr. Comey owes his job and his reputation to the night in 2004 when he rushed to the Washington hospital room of John Ashcroft, the attorney general, and prevented Bush administration officials from persuading him to reauthorize a classified program that had been ruled unconstitutional. At the time, Mr. Comey, a Republican, was the deputy attorney general.
Years later, when Mr. Obama was looking for a new F.B.I. director, Mr. Comey seemed an inspired bipartisan choice. But his style eventually grated on his bosses at the Justice Department.
In 2015, as prosecutors pushed for greater accountability for police misconduct, Mr. Comey embraced the controversial theory that scrutiny of police officers led to increases in crime — the so-called Ferguson effect. “We were really caught off guard,” said Vanita Gupta, the Justice Department’s top civil rights prosecutor at the time. “He lobbed a fairly inflammatory statement, without data to back it up, and walked away.”
 |
| Sam Hodgson for The New York Times |
-----
Both [Ms. Lynch and Mr. Comey] had been federal prosecutors in New York — Mr. Comey in the Manhattan limelight, Ms. Lynch in the lower-wattage Brooklyn office. The 6-foot-8 Mr. Comey commanded a room and the spotlight. Ms. Lynch, 5 feet tall, was known for being cautious and relentlessly on message. In her five months as attorney general, she had shown no sign of changing her style.
 |
| Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, where Ms. Lynch and former President Bill Clinton had an unscheduled meeting on the tarmac in June 2016. Spencer Platt/Getty Images |
-----
In late June, Ms. Lynch’s plane touched down at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport as part of her nationwide tour of police departments. Former President Bill Clinton was also in Phoenix that day, leaving from the same tarmac.
Ms. Lynch’s staff loaded into vans, leaving the attorney general and her husband on board. Mr. Clinton’s Secret Service agents mingled with her security team. When the former president learned who was on the plane, his aides say, he asked to say hello.
Mr. Clinton’s aides say he intended only to greet Ms. Lynch as she disembarked. But Ms. Lynch later told colleagues that the message she received — relayed from one security team to another — was that Mr. Clinton wanted to come aboard, and she agreed.
When Ms. Lynch’s staff members noticed Mr. Clinton boarding the plane, a press aide hurriedly called the Justice Department’s communications director, Melanie Newman, who said to break up the meeting immediately. A staff member rushed to stop it, but by the time the conversation ended, Mr. Clinton had been on the plane for about 20 minutes.
The meeting made the local news the next day and was soon the talk of Washington. Ms. Lynch said they had only exchanged pleasantries about golf and grandchildren, but Republicans called for her to recuse herself and appoint a special prosecutor.
Ms. Lynch said she would not step aside but would accept whatever career prosecutors and the F.B.I. recommended on the Clinton case — something she had planned to do all along.
Mr. Comey never suggested that she recuse herself. But at that moment, he knew for sure that when there was something to say about the case, he alone would say it.
 |
| Anthony D. Weiner, the former New York congressman, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times |
-----
F.B.I. agents in New York seized Anthony Weiner’s laptop in early October. The investigation was just one of many in the New York office and was not treated with great urgency, officials said. ...
Eventually, investigators realized that they had hundreds of thousands of emails, many of which belonged to [Ms. Huma Abedin, Mr. Weiner's wife and one of Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidantes] and had been backed up to her husband’s computer.
Then, agents in New York ...made another surprising discovery: evidence that some of the emails had moved through Mrs. Clinton’s old BlackBerry server, the one she used before moving to her home server. If Mrs. Clinton had intended to conceal something, agents had always believed, the evidence might be in those emails. But reading them would require another search warrant, essentially reopening the Clinton investigation.
The election was two weeks away.
 |
| Huma Abedin has long been one of of Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidants and served as a top aide during the campaign. Doug Mills/The New York Times |
----
“In my mind at the time, Clinton is likely to win,” Mr. Steinbach said. “It’s pretty apparent. So what happens after the election, in November or December? How do we say to the American public: ‘Hey, we found some things that might be problematic. But we didn’t tell you about it before you voted’? The damage to our organization would have been irreparable.”
----
Congressional Republicans were preparing for years of hearings during a Clinton presidency. If Mr. Comey became the subject of those hearings, F.B.I. officials feared, it would hobble the agency and harm its reputation. “I don’t think the organization would have survived that,” Mr. Steinbach said.
 |
| Zach Gibson/Getty Images |
----
Mr. Comey’s chief of staff called the office of Ms. Yates, the deputy attorney general, and revealed the plan.
When Ms. Lynch was told, she was both stunned and confused. While the Justice Department’s rules on “election year sensitivities” do not expressly forbid making comments close to an election, administrations of both parties have interpreted them as a broad prohibition against anything that may influence a political outcome.
Ms. Lynch understood Mr. Comey’s predicament, but not his hurry. In a series of phone calls, her aides told Mr. Comey’s deputies that there was no need to tell Congress anything until agents knew what the emails contained.
Either Ms. Lynch or Ms. Yates could have ordered Mr. Comey not to send the letter, but their aides argued against it. If Ms. Lynch issued the order and Mr. Comey obeyed, she risked the same fate that Mr. Comey feared: accusations of political interference and favoritism by a Democratic attorney general.
If Mr. Comey disregarded her order and sent the letter — a real possibility, her aides thought — it would be an act of insubordination that would force her to consider firing him, aggravating the situation.
So the debate ended at the staff level, with the Justice Department imploring the F.B.I. to follow protocol and stay out of the campaign’s final days. Ms. Lynch never called Mr. Comey herself.
----
Polls almost immediately showed Mrs. Clinton’s support declining. Presidential races nearly always tighten in the final days, but some political scientists reported a measurable “Comey effect.”
“This changes everything,” Mr. Trump said.
 |
| Stephen Crowley/The New York Times |
----
At the Justice Department, career prosecutors and political appointees privately criticized not only Mr. Comey for sending the letter but also Ms. Lynch and Ms. Yates for not stopping him. Many saw the letter as the logical result of years of not reining him in.
_______________________________________________________________[NY Times ]
The big takeaway may be that the reason everything happened the way it did is that everyone involved, from Comey up to President Obama, assumed Hillary Clinton was going to win. Their behavior was guided by that assumption.
In Comey’s case, he thought maybe he was establishing his independence toward the person who was going to be his next boss. In Obama’s case, it was maybe more that he didn’t want to be seen as interfering in an election and felt he didn’t need to because Hillary was going to win anyway.
All that strikes me as true. But here’s another takeaway for you, and I haven’t seen anyone make this point, and it’s an important one: If the Times is to be believed—and stories like this one, based on 30 interviews, might get some facts wrong but are generally accurate in the gist of what they convey—Comey was often motivated by fear. Fear of how a certain group would react.
-----...The article doesn’t say this, but surely Comey also feared GOP wrath if he did confirm before the election that Donald Trump was under investigation too, which he finally confirmed last month.
We also see at least one instance in which he feared the anger of his own agents (again, with respect to speaking harshly of Clinton last summer. And we know thanks to the late Wayne Barrett’s work here at The Daily Beast that he had reason to fear them, as agents leaked freely to Rudy Giuliani, who then broadcast them on Fox News).
Read more at MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST