Former FBI director James Comey testifies before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 8, 2017. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey just can’t help himself. I envision him pacing around his home like a caged lion, tail swishing, wheels turning, in a state of extreme agitation. The stress has really gotten to him. Knowing he should remain quiet, but unable to stop himself, he penned another op-ed.
It is pure projection. If you didn’t know Comey was the author, you might think it was written about him.
Comey: The president is a liar who doesn’t care what damage he does to vital institutions. We must call out his lies that the FBI was corrupt and committed treason, that we spied on the Trump campaign and tried to defeat Donald Trump. We must constantly return to the stubborn facts.
We would say the same about you. Look what happened to the reputation of the FBI under your watch. You and your team did send spies to infiltrate the Trump campaign and you did it to defeat Donald Trump. Stubborn things, those facts.
Comey: Russia engaged in a massive effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Near as I can tell, there is only one U.S. leader who still denies that fact. The FBI saw the attack starting in mid-June 2016, with the first dumping of stolen emails. In late July, when we were hard at work trying to understand the scope of the effort, we learned that one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers knew about the Russian effort seven weeks before we did.
In April 2016, that adviser talked to a Russian agent in London, learned that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails and that the Russians could assist the Trump campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Clinton. Of course, nobody from the Trump campaign told us this (or about later Russian approaches); we had to learn it, months after the fact, from an allied ambassador.
Trump does not deny Russia interfered in the election. No one does.
George Papadopoulos was told by one of your spies that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. You guys set him up. Your spy fed Papadopoulos information so he would then pass it on to another one of your spies, Alexander Downer. One correction, if I may, Mr. Comey. Downer stated specifically that Papadopoulos did not say “emails.” He said only “dirt.”
Comey: But when we finally learned of it in late July, what should the FBI have done? Let it go? Go tell the Trump campaign? Tell the press? No. Investigate, to see what the facts were. We didn’t know what was true. Maybe there was nothing to it, or maybe Americans were actively conspiring with the Russians. To find out, the FBI would live up to its name and investigate.
As director, I was determined that the work would be done carefully, professionally and discreetly. We were just starting. If there was nothing to it, we didn’t want to smear Americans. If there was something to it, we didn’t want to let corrupt Americans know we were onto them. So, we kept it secret. That’s how the FBI approaches all counterintelligence cases.
Here is where Comey starts trying to shape his own narrative.
If Comey were telling the truth, instead of trying to frame a young, naive campaign advisor, the reasonable course of action would have been to provide a defensive briefing to candidate Trump as they would have done for any other candidate.
Also, the timing just happened to coincide with the FBI’s receipt of the completed Steele dossier. On July 31st, Bruce Ohr delivered the dossier to the FBI. Ohr testified that he told every FBI official he encountered that it was unverified and that Steele harbored intense hatred for Donald Trump and wanted desperately for him to lose the election.
FBI officials knew the dossier was nothing more than malicious opposition research, yet it became their Bible. They presented it as the basis of a FISA Court application to spy on an American citizen, Carter Page, which provided a window into all of his contacts, which happened to include the entire Trump campaign.
Comey claims the FBI didn’t want to smear Americans. Yet they paid Christopher Steele to continue providing salacious dirt on Donald Trump.
This document was distributed liberally among Democrats in Washington over the summer of 2016. In September, Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele briefed several members of the media about the dossier. One reporter, Michael Isikoff, broke the story at the end of September. And what did the FBI do. They used Isikoff’s story to corroborate Steele’s dossier in their FISA Court application the next month.
Once the FBI had obtained the FISA warrant, they fired Steele for talking to the press. However, they continued to receive his information through DOJ official Bruce Ohr.
This train wreck of an op-ed continues along similar lines until, mercifully, it concludes. (It can be viewed here.) The long suffering Comey writes:
But go ahead, investigate the investigators, if you must. When those investigations are over, you will find the work was done appropriately and focused only on discerning the truth of very serious allegations. There was no corruption. There was no treason. There was no attempted coup. Those are lies, and dumb lies at that. There were just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances.
Sean Hannity addressed Comey’s op-ed on his show last night. (His opening can be viewed on the video below.)
Trump’s order to declassify all documents related to the investigation last week has the participants in the deep state coup against the President all shaken up.
His words for Comey? “Your rage for President Trump and intense love of the spotlight is really overcoming every bit of common sense you might have.”
Over and over, Hannity has reminded Comey that he has the right to remain silent. Yet he refuses to listen.
The post Hannity to Comey: ‘You Have The Right to Remain Silent’ – Why Doesn’t He Listen? appeared first on RedState.