The Sanctimony Bulk Pack

James Comey is a tall man and his self-regard towers over even his expansive height. Jonathan Turley reminds us of a few things:

The inspector general has confirmed what was clear and obvious. The memos were FBI material, and Comey did violate provisions of the Federal Records Act and FBI rules clearly barring their removal and disclosure. Moreover, the inspector general agreed that it was not necessary to guarantee an investigation into Trump. Investigations were ongoing and the report cites other “options” that Comey refused to use. The report concludes, “What was not permitted was the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.”

The reason Comey violated these rules was as obvious then as it is now. Leaking the memos was designed to improve his stature in the media and it worked. Comey transformed himself into a badly needed hero to use against the villain Trump. He knew the memos would change the focus of media coverage to his new role as a federal government whistleblower.

No one owes James Comey an apology.

Still alive

A few quick updates and ruminations from the blogger:

• Things are picking up on the job search a bit -- I feel confident I will be back in the saddle soon. More as I know more.
• We were back in St. Louis earlier in the week to bring Fearless Maria back for the summer. We would definitely like to have the state of Iowa physically removed from the trip. It's 566 miles each way from our house to the campus. That's a lot of driving.
• Politics continue to meander, but I sense AG Barr is starting to frighten the correct people. That's an encouraging sign. Let's see if they do anything more than identify the miscreants. If Roger Stone gets a no-knock nighttime raid, James Comey really ought to have one, too.
• Or better yet, let's get rid of no-knock nighttime raids altogether, please? This Gestapo stuff really needs to end.
• As expected, the citizenry of Minnesota and Wisconsin both have big-time buyer's remorse concerning their respective governors. It's worth remembering; even if you don't like Bad Orange Man, he's not likely to do much more than irritate your sensibilities. Democrats like to take your things.
• Fear the Deer.

Late Spring

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked. 

"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly." 

 -- Ernest Hemingway, "The Sun Also Rises"

Suddenly, we are learning things. Andrew McCarthy:

See, it has always been suspicious that the anonymous current and former government officials who leak classified information to their media friends have been unable to coordinate their spin on the start of “Crossfire Hurricane” — the name the FBI eventually gave its Trump-Russia investigation.

When it began matters a lot. Back to McCarthy:

With the revelation last week that the Obama administration had insinuated a spy into the Trump campaign, it appeared that we were back to the original, Page-centric origination story. But now there was a twist: The informant, longtime CIA source Stefan Halper, was run at Page by the FBI, in Britain. Because this happened just days after Page’s Moscow trip, the implication was that it was the Moscow trip itself, not the dossier claims about it, that provided momentum toward opening the investigation. Then, just a couple of weeks later, WikiLeaks began publicizing the DNC emails; this, we’re to understand, shook loose the Australian information about Papadopoulos. When that information made its way to the FBI — how, we’re not told — the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation was formally opened on July 31. Within days, Agent Peter Strzok was in London interviewing Downer, and soon the FBI tasked Halper to take a run at Papadopoulos.

I’m not buying it.

I'm not either. More:

Last week, as controversy stirred over the possibility that the Obama administration had used a spy against the Trump campaign, the eagle eye of the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel caught a couple of key passages from the House Intelligence Committee’s recent report on Russian interference in the election — largely overlooked passages on page 54.

It turns out that, in “late spring” 2016, the FBI’s then-director James Comey briefed the principals of the National Security Council on “the Page information.” As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York observes in a perceptive column today, NSC principals are an administration’s highest-ranking national-security officials. In Obama’s National Security Council, the president was the chairman, and among the regular attendees were the vice-president (Joe Biden), the national-security adviser (Susan Rice), and the director of national intelligence (James Clapper). The heads of such departments and agencies as the Justice Department (Attorney General Loretta Lynch) and the CIA (Director John Brennan) could also be invited to attend NSC meetings if matters of concern to them were to be discussed.

We do not know which NSC principals attended the Comey briefing about Carter Page. But how curious that the House Intelligence Committee interviewed so many Obama-administration officials who were on, or who were knowledgeable about, the NSC, and yet none of them provided a date for this meeting more precise than “late spring” 2016.

If this is true, we're now into "what did the president know and when did he know it" territory. It's worth remembering that Andrew McCarthy isn't a carnival barker like Sean Hannity and he is writing from National Review, which has been the primary Never Trump calliope in right-wing media. So what happened? McCarthy looks at the timeline and makes an educated guess:

There are many different ways the Obama administration could have reacted to the news that Page and Manafort had joined the Trump campaign. It could have given the campaign a defensive briefing. It could have continued interviewing Page, with whom the FBI had longstanding lines of communication. It could have interviewed Manafort. It could have conducted a formal interview with George Papadopoulos rather than approaching him with a spy who asked him loaded questions about Russia’s possession of Democratic-party emails.

Instead of doing some or all of those things, the Obama administration chose to look at the Trump campaign as a likely co-conspirator of Russia — either because Obama officials inflated the flimsy evidence, or because they thought it could be an effective political attack on the opposition party’s likely candidate.

From the “late spring” on, every report of Trump-Russia ties, no matter how unlikely and uncorroborated, was presumed to be proof of a traitorous arrangement. And every detail that could be spun into Trump-campaign awareness of Russian hacking, no matter how tenuous, was viewed in the worst possible light.

We are now approaching the "late spring" of 2018, two years on. Sunlight has been gradual at best, but we're learning things suddenly now. And Andrew McCarthy isn't the only one looking for answers:

Congressional Republicans have been calling for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate alleged misconduct at the FBI and Justice Department for months now, and finally, a group of them will be introducing a resolution on Tuesday asking for just that.

Up to now, the Obama leftovers in the Justice Department, i.e., most everyone, have been trying to stonewall or kick things down the road. The latest gambit has been turn these new matters over to the Inspector General investigating other related shenanigans, but there's a jurisdictional issue there:

Washington D.C. attorney Victoria Toensing on Monday called Rosenstein's offer to expand the investigation "embarrassing and "a scam."

"He’s going to have the IG look into it? The IG? Now how is the IG going to talk to Sally Yates, who has left the Department?" she asked.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte wrote a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions two months ago, joining other congressmen in calling for the appointment of a second special counsel for that very reason.

“When I counted up 24 witnesses that he would not be able to access were he to investigate it, yeah only one conclusion, that’s special counsel,” Gowdy told Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer on Special Report back in March. Horowitz has no access to "anyone who no longer works for the Department of Justice, FBI, State Department," Gowdy explained.

Included on the list of witnesses would be former FBI director James Comey, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, James Rybicki (Comey’s former chief-of-staff), and Clinton fixers Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer. Another name that could be added to the list is alleged FBI informant Stefan Halper.

Just a guess -- Donald Trump is going to see the wisdom of this request and make it happen.

Ask an expert

If the problem with the Trump administration is a tendency to collude, they really ought to get better at it. Perhaps they could ask some experts. The invaluable Judicial Watch has the details:

On May 17, 2017, Comey received notices to appear before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee.

An email chain dated May 18 and 19, 2017, with the subject line “Future testimony” shows then-FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki, then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Assistant Director Gregory Brower, Comey and others discussing Comey’s upcoming testimony:

In this chain, on May 18 at 6:30 pm, Comey wrote to Rybicki to confirm that he had accepted the invitation to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) but declined the invitations from the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee.

Comey also writes: “Last, would you please tell OGC [Office of the General Counsel] that I would like to be able to review any documents authored by me or on which I am copied that will be produced to SSCI in connection with my testimony and would like the opportunity for that review before I testify?”

An email from a redacted sender, apparently Comey, to Rybicki dated May 19 at 11:49 am reads:

Jim

I just got off a call with Senators Burr and Warner. They would like to have a hearing next Wednesday at which I testify, first in open session and then in closed, if necessary. I asked them not to announce it until I check with FBI/DOJ to see if you want to discuss anything before they do that. I told them I had asked for guidance on any institutional prerogatives and for the opportunity to review any documents FBI has produced that relate to me. I told them I would communicate with them by the end of the day to either ask them to hold announcing the Wednesday hearing or go ahead.

Many thanks.

Jim

On May 19 at 2:10 pm, Rybicki writes back:

Director: We just met to discuss the requests outlined in the two emails below. Before responding the General Counsel has asked me to confirm that you have discussed with the attorneys representing you, and that you are comfortable discussing these issues with us rather than communicating through your counsel.

On May 19 at 3:02 pm, a redacted sender, likely Comey, responds to Rybicki: “Yes and yes.”

Remember, Comey had been fired at this point. Why was he still talking to people in the FBI and colluding with them? Do you suppose Michael Flynn was offered similar courtesies? And note that Comey was willing to talk to some committees, but not others. The House Oversight Committee is Trey Gowdy's shop -- not someone who Comey would want to deal with. As for the Senate Judiciary Committee, that's Chuck Grassley's group -- again, a potential adversary Comey wouldn't want. It's not surprising he'd rather see Senators Burr and Warner, who were far less likely to ask him tough questions.

The whole investigation has stunk from the get-go. And the reasons are all hiding in plain sight. No matter what you think of Donald Trump's vulgarian deportment, he is the duly elected president. That Comey and Mueller were working with the FBI to collude coordinate testimony tells you everything you need to know about the nature of Mueller's work. It's never been about justice. It's all about preserving fiefdoms. I don't want any of these goons to be lord of our manor.

Layers of the onion

Andrew McCarthy, scales removed from his eyes, is now peeling back the layers on GotterMuellerung:

Yes, it was clear that [FBI Agent Peter] Strzok engaged in serious misconduct: The married G-man’s reported extramarital affair with his married FBI colleague Lisa Page was scandalous not only for the obvious reasons but as potential blackmail material against counterintelligence agents. Plus, Strzok appears to have been the main investigator in the Hillary Clinton emails case that the FBI and Justice Department bent over backwards not to prosecute; and there is reason to believe his rabidly anti-Trump text messages with his paramour crossed the line from arrogant political banter to unprofessional investigative decision-making.

But there were dissonant notes, too, cutting against the neat ditty about a high-ranking government agent acting on a corrupt partisan agenda. For one thing, I was hearing from people with good national-security credentials that Strzok was a highly effective counterintelligence agent.

And then there was Mike Flynn.

You remember Mike Flynn. He was briefly Trump's National Security Adviser. The guy our Lord and Savior* Robert Mueller got to cop a guilty plea. The guy who lied to the FBI. Or did he?

The first revelations about Strzok’s texts came only days after General Flynn, who had fleetingly served as President Trump’s first national-security adviser, pled guilty in the Mueller investigation to a charge of lying to FBI investigators. Strzok had conducted the interview with Flynn. Combine that with the fact that he had been a principal in all the important FBI interviews in the Clinton caper, and the presumption crystalized: Political hack Strzok went kid-gloves on the Hillary Gang and scorched-earth on Trump World.

That’s not reality, though. 

There is a problem here. Strzok didn't think Flynn lied. But Mueller and his band of avenging angels went scorched earth on Flynn. Back to McCarthy:

Flynn’s case is back in the news thanks to Byron York’s important Washington Examiner report yesterday. He retraces the history: Because Flynn was a Trump transition official and incoming national-security adviser, there was nothing at all inappropriate about his discussing Obama-imposed sanctions against Russia with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Nevertheless, then–acting attorney general and Obama partisan Sally Yates seriously considered prosecuting Flynn under the absurd, never-invoked Logan Act. This misconception that Flynn had done something wrong led Yates and Comey to have Flynn interviewed as if he were a criminal suspect. Apparently unconcerned, Flynn agreed to be interviewed without counsel. Strzok came away from the session believing that Flynn had told the truth. Comey, Byron York reports, “told lawmakers that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe that Flynn had lied to them, or that any inaccuracies in his answers were intentional.”

Yet, ten months later, with Yates, Comey, and Strzok now out of the picture, Mueller decided to charge Flynn with lying to the FBI anyway. And Flynn decided to plead guilty — perhaps because he was guilty . . . or perhaps because he lacked the resources to sustain the legal fight . . . or perhaps because he feared Mueller’s team would otherwise prosecute his son.

But there's more. McCarthy noticed something that seems important:

The judge who accepted Flynn’s guilty plea was Rudolph Contreras. Mysteriously, just days after taking Flynn’s plea, Judge Contreras recused himself from the case. The press has been remarkably uncurious about this development. No rationale for the recusal has been offered, no explanation for why, if Judge Contreras had some sort of conflict, the recusal came after the guilty plea, not before. We can note that Contreras is one of the eleven federal district judges assigned to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

We do not know if Judge Contreras signed one or more of the FISA warrants the Justice Department sought for Trump campaign figures Carter Page and Paul Manafort (or even if signing a FISA warrant would constitute grounds for a conflict in Flynn’s case). We can note, however, that Contreras is one of just three FISA court judges who sits in the District of Columbia, where it is likely the Trump-Russia FISA warrants were sought.

That's. . . odd. But this is worse:

When Judge Contreras pulled out, Flynn’s case was reassigned to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan. We now know that one of Judge Sullivan’s first actions on the case was to file an order directing Mueller to provide Flynn with any evidence in the special counsel’s possession that is favorable to Flynn, whether on the issue of guilt or of sentencing. Significantly, the order stresses that if Mueller has such evidence but believes it is not “material” and therefore that Flynn is not entitled to disclosure of it, Mueller must show the evidence to the court so that Judge Sullivan may decide whether to mandate its disclosure.

Did Mueller's team tell Flynn that Strzok didn't think he'd committed the crime. If he had, why would Mueller be charging him in the first place? And if he had, what are the chances Flynn would have pled guilty? Back to McCarthy:

Now, it could be that this is just Judge Sullivan’s standard order on exculpatory information, filed in every case over which he presides. But it is noteworthy that Flynn had already pled guilty, and in the course of doing so had agreed to Mueller’s demand that he waive “the right to any further discovery or disclosures of information not already provided” — in addition to forfeiting many other trial and appellate rights. (See plea agreement, pages 6–7.) It certainly appears that Sullivan’s order supersedes the plea agreement and imposes on the special counsel the obligation to reveal any and all evidence suggesting that Flynn is innocent of the charge to which he has admitted guilt.

It's important to understand -- getting Flynn's scalp is Mueller's biggest accomplishment. Paul Manafort's alleged crimes happened well before he signed on to the Trump campaign, while George Papadopolous was at best a low-level functionary, no matter what his fiancee says. And no one has charged Carter Page with anything. If it turns out that Mueller's team withheld exculpatory evidence to get Flynn to cop a plea, this thing could blow sky-high.

*If my tongue were planted any further in my cheek, it would come out my elbow.

Dawn breaks

Andrew McCarthy, a former Justice Department official who is the big legal mind at National Review, has spent a lot of time over the past year throwing cold water on claims that there was skulduggery afoot at DOJ under the Obama administration. He couldn't believe or imagine his old pals would be hacks and criminals. They would never abandon integrity, would they? Not them!

Well, he's starting to figure it out:

In May 2017, as I have detailed (here), Steele was required to respond to interrogatories. He emphasized that his dossier allegations were “raw intelligence” that was “unverified” and “warranted investigation.” He further described his reports as “limited intelligence” that described mere “indications” of “possible” coordination between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. He was not in a position to vouch for the accuracy of what he’d been told, he explained; he passed it along because it needed further investigation.

Yet, far from reporting Steele’s retreat to the FISA court, Grassley and Graham report that the FBI and Justice Department continued vouching for the reliability of his allegations.

Beyond all that, we now learn through the senators’ memo, and some follow-up reporting, that two longtime Clinton cronies, Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal, fed their own anti-Trump dossier to Steele, through a State Department official, Jonathan Winer. In the fall of 2016, Steele, while working on his Clinton-funded project, reported this Clinton-crony information to the FBI.

Still, the FBI and Justice Department elected not to tell the FISA court that the Clinton campaign was paying for Steele’s unverified, unverifiable anti-Trump research.

I spent many months assuring people that nothing like this could ever happen — that the FBI and Justice Department would not countenance the provision to the FISA court of uncorroborated allegations of heinous misconduct. When Trump enthusiasts accused them of rigging the process, I countered that they probably had not even used the Steele dossier. If the Justice Department had used it in writing a FISA warrant application, I insisted that the FBI would independently verify any important facts presented to the court, make any disclosures that ought in fairness be made so the judge could evaluate the credibility of the sources, and compellingly demonstrate probable cause before alleging that an American was a foreign agent.  

I was wrong.

Yes. Yes, you were. I was, too. I'm still not crazy about many things Donald Trump does, but there's no evidence he would sink to the level of his predecessors, levels that are now amply documented, if not yet widely disclosed. To be fair, McCarthy wasn't nearly as much of a NeverTrumper as some of his colleagues at NR, but he made common cause with them. The scales have fallen from his eyes.

I continue to wait for the rest of the NeverTrumpers to understand that, in their zeal to condemn the uncouth orange haired-occupant of the Oval Office, in their bien pensant efforts to signal their own virtue, that they are in the same camp with people who spent the period of 2009-2017 wiping their asses with the Constitution. If you want to pretend you are principled, it is best you don't hang out with vipers like James Comey. They may have been your colleagues, but they were never your friends.

McCabe and Mr. Mueller

If you want to understand the sort of people who run our government and how they operate, this story from Mollie Hemingway is crucial:

The FBI’s top brass initiated conversations with a White House official that were quickly leaked to CNN, according to a new book.

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe asked to speak privately with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus following a February 2017 intelligence briefing. The scene is described in “Media Madness,” Howard Kurtz’s new book on the press and its relationship with the Trump administration. McCabe said he asked for the meeting to tell Priebus that “everything” in a New York Times story authored by Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo was “bullsh-t.”

Well, yes. Way too much of what is in the NYT is bovine fecal matter. We continue:

McCabe claimed to want Priebus to know the FBI’s perspective that this story was not true. Priebus pointed to the televisions that were going non-stop on the story. He asked if the FBI could say publicly what he had just told him. McCabe said he’d have to check, according to the book.

McCabe reportedly called back and said he couldn’t do anything about it. Then-FBI director James Comey reportedly called later and also said he couldn’t do anything, but did offer to brief the Senate Intelligence Committee on the matter later that week, suggesting they’d spill the beans publicly. You’ll never guess what happened next, according to the book:

Actually, I bet we all could, but here you go:

Now, a week later, CNN was airing a breaking news story naming Priebus. According to ‘multiple U.S. officials,’ the network said, ‘the FBI rejected a White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump’s associates and Russians known to U.S. intelligence.’

Priebus was stunned by the implication that he was pressuring law enforcement. Had he been set up? Why was the FBI leaking this information when one of its top officials had initiated the conversation?

Because Andrew McCabe is a weasel. And Reince Priebus was a trusting guy from Wisconsin who didn't understand how the game is played. In other words, this is what happened (video not safe for work):

And these sorts of games continued. Back to Hemingway:

This story gives a glimpse into how that original Russia narrative may have been spread around to overly compliant journalists and other members of the “resistance.” It was the hysteria surrounding this and other stories that led the White House to be frustrated with a law enforcement agency and chief playing games. As Comey admitted under oath, he did tell President Trump three times that Trump was not under investigation. These private statements to Trump occurred while Comey publicly insinuated the opposite. This story above fits the same pattern.

These are the dedicated public servants Adam Schiff and the rest of the Democrats are claiming deserve deference. And these are the friends of Robert Mueller.

Cleanup Time

Do you believe the federal government acts with integrity? At bottom, that's what's going on. Sharyl Attkisson makes the point:

There are two overarching issues.

First, there’s the alleged improper use of politically-funded opposition research to justify secret warrants to spy on U.S. citizens for political purposes.

Second, if corruption is ultimately identified at high levels in our intel agencies, it would necessitate a re-examination of every case and issue the officials touched over the past decade — or two — under administrations of both parties.

This is why I think the concerns transcend typical party politics.

It touches everybody. It’s potentially monumental.

It's important to understand what happened. Back to Attkisson:

[Sen. Charles] Grassley also pointed out that agencies accused of possible improprieties are the ones controlling the information. It’s the FBI who may have misused the unverified “dossier” opposition research, allegedly presenting it to a secret court as if it were verified intelligence.

“[FBI] Director [James] Comey testified in 2017 that it was ‘salacious and unverified’,” said Grassley. “So, it was a collection of unverified opposition research funded by a political opponent in an election year. Would it be proper for the Obama administration — or any administration — to use something like that to authorize further investigation that intrudes on the privacy of people associated with its political opponents? That should bother civil libertarians of any political stripe.”

It should, but if doesn't. Having other people find out what you've done bothers them, though.

Meantime, the Department of Justice has officially warned the House Intelligence Committee not to release its memo. It's like the possible defendant in a criminal trial threatening prosecutors for having the audacity to reveal alleged evidence to the judge and jury.

This is the first time I can recall open government groups and many reporters joining in the argument to keep the information secret. They are strangely uncurious about alleged improprieties with implications of the worst kind: Stasi-like tactics used against Americans. “Don’t be irresponsible and reveal sources and methods,” they plead.

If the sources and methods are as corrupt as the people in charge are, it all needs to be revealed. And it's time to clean things up.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Hey, guess what? Missing documents!

The Justice Department has turned over to Congress additional text messages involving an FBI agent who was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigative team following the discovery of derogatory comments about President Donald Trump.

But the department also said in a letter to lawmakers that its record of messages sent to and from the agent, Peter Strzok, was incomplete because the FBI, for technical reasons, had been unable to preserve and retrieve about five months' worth of communications.

Technical reasons. Technically, the 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes was a technical problem, too. There's more:

In addition to the communications already made public, the Justice Department on Friday provided [Sen. Ron] Johnson's committee with 384 pages of text messages, according to a letter from the Wisconsin lawmaker that was obtained by The Associated Press.

But, according to the letter, the FBI told the department that its system for retaining text messages sent and received on bureau phones had failed to preserve communications between Strzok and Page over a five-month period between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. May 17 was the date that Mueller was appointed as special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.

The explanation for the gap was "misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI's collection capabilities."

Of course, Strzok went to work for Robert Mueller. It's mind-boggling, really. But there's more:

In Johnson's letter to Wray, he asks whether the FBI has any records of communications between Strzok and Page during that five-month window and whether the FBI had searched their non-FBI phones for additional messages. He also asks for the "scope and scale" of any other records from the Clinton investigation that have been lost.

This is a crucial question. If all the records are gone, that's bad enough, but if only the Strzok stuff has gone missing, we're talking about a horrific scandal. What's available is bad enough:

One of the messages references a change in language to Comey's statement closing out the email case involving Clinton, Trump's Democratic opponent in the 2016 presidential election. While an earlier draft of the statement said Clinton and President Barack Obama had an email exchange while Clinton was "on the territory" of a hostile adversary, the reference to Obama was at first changed to "senior government official" and then omitted entirely in the final version. 

In another exchange, the two express displeasure about the timing of Lynch's announcement that she would defer to the FBI's judgment on the Clinton investigation. That announcement came days after it was revealed that the attorney general and former President Bill Clinton had an impromptu meeting aboard her plane in Phoenix, though both sides said the email investigation was never discussed. 

Strzok said in a July 1 text message that the timing of Lynch's announcement "looks like hell." And Page appears to mockingly refer to Lynch's decision to accept the FBI's conclusion in the case as a "real profile in courag(e) since she knows no charges will be brought."

These people are the Justice Department. It's a bad joke and the more we learn, the worse it gets.

Keyser Soze Strzok

Yeah, this is a problem:

A former top counterintelligence expert at the FBI, now at the center of a political uproar for exchanging private messages that appeared to mock President Donald Trump, changed a key phrase in former FBI Director James Comey's description of how former secretary of state Hillary Clinton handled classified information, according to US officials familiar with the matter.

Electronic records show Peter Strzok, who led the investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server as the No. 2 official in the counterintelligence division, changed Comey's earlier draft language describing Clinton's actions as "grossly negligent" to "extremely careless," the sources said.

The drafting process was a team effort, CNN is told, with a handful of people reviewing the language as edits were made, according to another US official familiar with the matter.

Why does changing the verbiage matter? Back to the report:

The shift from "grossly negligent" to "extremely careless," which may appear pedestrian at first glance, reflected a decision by the FBI that could have had potentially significant legal implications, as the federal law governing the mishandling of classified material establishes criminal penalties for "gross negligence."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, raised questions over why the change was made after receiving documents from the FBI last month, but the identity of who was behind the edit has not been reported until now.

Strzok appears to be at the center of a lot of things:

CNN has also learned that Strzok was the FBI official who signed the document officially opening an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to sources familiar with the matter. As the No. 2 official in counterintelligence, Strzok was considered to be one of the bureau's top experts on Russia.

But the news of Strzok's direct role in the statement that ultimately cleared the former Democratic presidential candidate of criminal wrongdoing, now combined with the fact that he was dismissed from special counsel Robert Mueller's team after exchanging private messages with an FBI lawyer that could be seen as favoring Clinton politically, may give ammunition to those seeking ways to discredit Mueller's Russia investigation.

The FBI lawyer in question is Lisa Page. Strzok was also having an affair with her. But there's more:

The FBI agent who was fired from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation team for sending anti-Donald Trump text messages conducted the interviews with two Hillary Clinton aides accused of giving false statements about what they knew of the former secretary of state’s private email server.

Neither of the Clinton associates, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, faced legal consequences for their misleading statements, which they made in interviews last year with former FBI section chief Peter Strzok.

And so who was in charge of the interview with Michael Flynn, now in the crosshairs for lying to the FBI? It would be our guy Strzok:

But another Strzok interview subject was not so lucky.

Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, pleaded guilty last week to lying during an interview he gave on Jan. 24 to Strzok and another FBI agent. Circa journalist Sara Carter reported on Monday that Strzok took part in that interview with the retired lieutenant general.

And why does that matter?

At the time, Strzok was the FBI’s top investigator on the fledgling investigation into Russian interference in the presidential campaign. He was appointed to supervise that effort at the end of July 2016, just weeks after the conclusion of the Clinton email probe. CNN reported on Monday that as the FBI’s No. 2 counterintelligence official, Strzok signed the documents that officially opened the collusion inquiry.

The starkly different outcomes from Strzok’s interviews — a felony charge against Flynn and a free pass to Mills and Abedin — are sure to raise questions from Republicans about double-standards in the FBI’s two most prominent political investigations. FBI Director Christopher Wray will likely be pressed on the Strzok scandal on Thursday when he attends an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Either we have a justice system, or we don't. Either we treat everyone in the same way, or we don't. If we don't, we're past the rule of law and fully into something entirely different. When federal agents are simultaneously political operatives and use their powers to absolve their friends and indict their enemies, we are in a truly dangerous place. Mueller and others associated with the FBI have been stonewalling Congress for months now, precisely because proper oversight would reveal such improprieties and lead to a public outcry against the schemes of those who are supposed to serve the cause of justice. And there's more:

Along with Justice Department attorney David Laufman, Strzok interviewed Clinton herself on July 2, 2016. The pair also interviewed Mills, Abedin and two other Clinton aides, Jake Sullivan and Heather Samuelson.

Summaries of the interviews, known as 302s, were released by the FBI last year.

A review of those documents conducted by The Daily Caller shows that Mills and Abedin told Strzok and Laufman that they were not aware of Clinton’s server until after she left the State Department.

“Mills did not learn Clinton was using a private server until after Clinton’s [Department of State] tenure,” reads notes from Mills’ May 28, 2016 interview. “Mills stated she was not even sure she knew what a server was at the time.”

Abedin also denied knowing about Clinton’s server until leaving the State Department in 2013.

“Abedin did not know that Clinton had a private server until about a year and a half ago when it became public knowledge,” the summary of Strzok’s interview with Abedin states.

But that wasn't true:

But undercutting those denials are email exchanges in which both Mills and Abedin either directly discussed or were involved in discussing Clinton’s server.

“hrc email coming back — is server okay?” Mills asked in a Feb. 27, 2010 email to Abedin and Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton who helped set up the Clinton server.

“Ur funny. We are on the same server,” Cooper replied.

So is lying to the FBI a crime, or is it not? Here's James Comey on the matter in 2016:

Former FBI Director James Comey defended the Clinton aides’ inconsistent statements in a House Judiciary Committee hearing held on Sept. 28, 2016.

“Having done many investigations myself, there’s always conflicting recollections of facts, some of which are central [to the investigation], some of which are peripheral,” Comey told Jason Chaffetz, a former Utah congressman who served on the committee last year.

Chaffetz was not buying Comey’s dismissive response.

“I think she lied to everybody,” he said of Mills in an interview on Fox News the night of the Comey hearing.

“There’s direct evidence that she actually did know [about the server],” said Chaffetz, who added that Comey’s defense of Mills “makes no sense.”

If Michael Flynn should be brought to justice for lying to the FBI, then Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills should be, too. Either we have a justice system, or we have something else. It's increasingly clear we have something else.

Swamp things

So you're wondering why the headlines today are about Jeff Flake's denunciation of Le Grand Orange? It keeps the real stories off the front page:

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

It wasn't Trump colluding with the Russians. But there's more:

Here’s another story as plausible as we can make it based on credible reporting. After the Cold War, in its own interest, the U.S. wanted to build bridges to the Russian nuclear establishment. The Putin government, for national or commercial purposes, agreed and sought to expand its nuclear business in the U.S.

The purchase and consolidation of certain assets were facilitated by Canadian entrepreneurs who gave large sums to the Clinton Foundation, and perhaps arranged a Bill Clinton speech in Moscow for $500,000. A key transaction had to be approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Now we learn that, before and during these transactions, the FBI had uncovered a bribery and kickback scheme involving Russia’s U.S. nuclear business, and also received reports of Russian officials seeking to curry favor through donations to the Clinton Foundation.

This criminal activity was apparently not disclosed to agencies vetting the 2010 transfer of U.S. commercial nuclear assets to Russia. The FBI made no move to break up the scheme until long after the transaction closed. Only five years later, the Justice Department, in 2015, disclosed a plea deal with the Russian perpetrator so quietly that its significance was missed until The Hill reported on the FBI investigation last week.

And who was involved in all that? Robert Mueller, who conveniently is the guy heading up the witch hunt against Trump:

The agency, when Mr. Mueller headed it, soft-pedaled an investigation highly embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton as well as the Obama Russia reset policy. More recently, if just one of two things is true—Russia sponsored the Trump Dossier, or Russian fake intelligence prompted Mr. Comey’s email intervention—then Russian operations, via their impact on the FBI, influenced and continue to influence our politics in a way far more consequential than any Facebook ad, the preoccupation of John McCain, who apparently cannot behold a mountain if there’s a molehill anywhere nearby.

And that's not all:

Which means that Mr. Mueller has the means, motive and opportunity to obfuscate and distract from matters embarrassing to the FBI, while pleasing a large part of the political spectrum. He need only confine his focus to the flimsy, disingenuous but popular (with the media) accusation that the shambolic Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.

Mr. Mueller’s tenure may not have bridged the two investigations, but James Comey’s, Rod Rosenstein’s , Andrew Weissmann’s , and Andrew McCabe’s did. Mr. Rosenstein appointed Mr. Mueller as special counsel. Mr. Weissmann now serves on Mr. Mueller’s team. Mr. McCabe remains deputy FBI director. All were involved in the nuclear racketeering matter and the Russia meddling matter.

So if we're reading this correctly, the criminals are the ones doing the investigating. All summer long, we've heard that Trump couldn't fire Mueller, because it would provoke a constitutional crisis. You know what is a crisis? Having a permanent government that can't be removed and can spend millions of dollars to throw the country off the trail of its own corruption. Comey may be gone, but why the hell are McCabe and Rosenstein in charge of anything other than preparing for their own depositions?

And one other thing -- if you've followed the story, you might remember that an unnamed Republican campaign started the ball rolling on this. Can you guess which campaign it was? Maybe this will help you figure it out:

Former President George W. Bush rejected the trade and immigration stances that President Donald Trump has made a centerpiece of his administration, and argued that the U.S. should continue defending free markets and democracy globally.

In a speech at a George W. Bush Institute event Thursday in New York, the 43rd president, who has largely avoided the political fray since leaving office, also denounced bigotry and bullying, saying civil discourse was needed. Mr. Bush didn’t mention his fellow Republican by name.

Civil discourse in this context means letting the status quo slide. Nope.

This seems like news

Funny you're not seeing it anywhere beyond The Hill:

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

I thought Trump was the one colluding with the Russians. Huh. And there's more:

The investigation was ultimately supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, an Obama appointee who now serves as President Trump’s deputy attorney general, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, now the deputy FBI director under Trump, Justice Department documents show.

Both men now play a key role in the current investigation into possible, but still unproven, collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. McCabe is under congressional and Justice Department inspector general investigation in connection with money his wife’s Virginia state Senate campaign accepted in 2015 from now-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe at a time when McAuliffe was reportedly under investigation by the FBI. The probe is not focused on McAuliffe's conduct but rather on whether McCabe's attendance violated the Hatch Act or other FBI conflict rules.

The connections to the current Russia case are many. The Mikerin probe began in 2009 when Robert Mueller, now the special counsel in charge of the Trump case, was still FBI director. And it ended in late 2015 under the direction of then-FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired earlier this year.

Seems convenient, doesn't it? Have the people who should be under investigation investigating something else. If Trump wants to stir the pot, he ought to retweet this story. Other than conservative comment sites, the only newspaper that seems to have the story is the New York Post. I strongly encourage you hit the link and read the piece from The Hill.

The Co-Me Generation

Random thoughts on Comey:

• One shouldn't have to say this, but apparently we do -- disagreeing with James Comey on the state of the FBI does not make Donald Trump a liar. Trump's relationship with the truth is episodic, but not in this instance. If Trump felt the FBI was in disarray, he's certainly entitled to that opinion, no matter how much it hurts Comey's feelings.
• It's ludicrous for Comey to assert that his firing was designed to stop any investigations, because the investigations haven't stopped. He knows that, of course, but his immediate career goal is amour propre.
• Comey admitted he's a leaker. That's important, because it helps to establish a pattern that needs to be addressed. As I'm writing this, Trump is tweeting the same point:

Epistemology, again

• Comey's leak did accomplish what he wanted, since he did get a special counsel named. Now that we know the provenance of all this, it makes Robert Mueller's next moves especially interesting. Mueller could take the usual approach and go all Inspector Javert on Trump, or he might conclude that the pretext for the investigation is based on vapor and close up shop quickly. I would expect Mueller to take the Javert approach, because he's going to respond to incentives like anyone else and leading the charge against Trump is far more likely to get you praised in the Washington Post, but we'll see.
• In many respects, the underlying narrative took on a lot of water yesterday. It's going to be difficult to go after anyone concerning Russian spying, because it's not really much of a story. We're now in the process crime phase, which was the point of this exercise in the first place. It's obstruction of justice, apparently, because Comey himself is Justice, and you can't fire Justice. Nice racket, actually -- it's every bureaucrat's dream!
• The next move, quite clearly, is to bring Comey back to the Hill, but this time in front of the Judiciary Committee. Comey finally started to throw Loretta Lynch under the bus yesterday and we need to know more about that. He'd clearly rather not talk about those matters, but it's time he did.

Comey Comey Comey Comey Comey Chameleon

We have the transcript of James Comey's prepared remarks for today's hearing. You can read it here -- it is a PDF.

I'm bored with this Comey. He's living in his own narrative, the heroic actor dealing with the uncouth ruffian. We get that. Official Washington is entirely convinced that the ruffian needs to go. We get that. I'm hopeful we won't see much of Comey after today. Unless he gives Official Washington what it wants, we won't.

Memo to file

If it is true that Donald Trump tried stop an FBI investigation, he's in a hell of a lot of trouble. At this point, we don't know that. The New York Times is reporting that James Comey wrote a memo about it, but the Times doesn't have the memo in question. We don't know if such a memo actually exists. We only have the following:

Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of it to a Times reporter.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

"One of Mr. Comey's associates read parts of it to a Times reporter." That's a pretty thin reed. If you were to read "Curious George Gets a Medal" to a Times reporter, would that prove Curious George was part of the space program?

What's been striking about almost all the reporting about Trump's great sins is how often the reporting is based on anonymous sources, which is almost all the time. The denials of the reporting, as we saw with H. R. McMaster yesterday, is always on the record. Does that matter? Of course. Writing for the Federalist, Mollie Hemingway makes the salient point:

Previous Washington Post stories sourced to anonymous “officials” have fallen apart, including Josh Rogin’s January 26 report claiming that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned” as “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.”

The story went viral before the truth caught up. As per procedure, the Obama administration had, in coordination with the incoming Trump administration, asked for the resignations of all political appointees. While it would have been traditional to let them stay for a few months, the Trump team let them know that their services wouldn’t be necessary. The entire story was wrong.

So should you be skeptical of the reporting? I won't tell you what you should think, but you should look at the pattern Hemingway establishes in her article.

Back to the Comey memo. Let's assume it actually exists. If the narrative in this case is accurate, and Trump was actually trying to obstruct justice, what was Comey's responsibility? To write a memo to file, or to report the President's actions up through the chain of command? I would argue he'd be required to do both, about which more in a moment. His boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, was new in office and there were any number of deputies around who were Obama-era holdovers, so there wouldn't have been any political danger in reporting the actions. From what we know, Comey didn't do that.

Frankly, if Trump was trying to obstruct justice, Comey's responsibility would have been to go public immediately and resign his position. He didn't do that. Beyond that, you can argue that Comey was also guilty of obstructing justice by not reporting the incident at the time it happened. Writing for Fox News, Greg Jarrett, who is an attorney, points out the relevant statute:

Under the law, Comey is required to immediately inform the Department of Justice of any attempt to obstruct justice by any person, even the President of the United States.  Failure to do so would result in criminal charges against Comey.  (18 USC 4 and 28 USC 1361)  He would also, upon sufficient proof, lose his license to practice law.

So, if Comey believed Trump attempted to obstruct justice, did he comply with the law by reporting it to the DOJ?  If not, it calls into question whether the events occurred as the Times reported it. 

You can assume Jarrett is a partisan hack, his reading of the statutory language seems correct to me:

Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 684; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(G), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147.)

That's 18 USC 4. What does 28 USC 1361 say?

The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any action in the nature of mandamus to compel an officer or employee of the United States or any agency thereof to perform a duty owed to the plaintiff.
(Added Pub. L. 87–748, § 1(a), Oct. 5, 1962, 76 Stat. 744.)

Comey was head of the FBI. He would know the relevant statutory language. Either his mens rea was working properly and he didn't think Trump committed a crime, or he's personally guilty of obstructing justice by not reporting immediately to his superiors what Trump did. I'll bet at least one person in Congress will be asking that question.

One last point -- you might remember that, when Comey was fired, he was in Los Angeles giving a speech and that he found out about his firing because of news reports that were running on television monitors behind him. Most of the commentary I've seen suggested that Trump was just being a jerk by firing Comey that way. Perhaps. I don't think so, however. I suspect the timing was quite intentional. Since Comey was across the country at the time of his firing, he would not have been able to secure his office and dispose of anything that might later be a problem for him. You can safely assume Jeff Sessions now has everything Comey had, including any memoranda he wrote in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Comey knows that, too.

Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, while you were Comeytose

While everyone in Washington is getting their Sam Ervin on, an inconvenient truth:

Aetna is saying goodbye to Obamacare.

The insurance giant announced Wednesday that it would not offer policies in Nebraska or Delaware next year, completing its exit from the exchanges. Earlier this year, Aetna (AET) said it would pull out of Iowa and Virginia in 2018.

The company said it expects to lose more than $200 million in its individual business line this year, on top of nearly $700 million in losses between 2014 and 2016. Aetna withdrew from 11 of its 15 markets for 2017. It has 255,000 Obamacare policyholders this year, down from 964,000 at the end of last year.

These customers, however, continue to be costlier than the company expected, Aetna said during its earnings call earlier this month. It had to set aside an additional $110 million to cover larger-than-projected losses for this year.

If you care to do that math, it means Aetna has lost over a billion dollars on the Obamacare exchange business. And other insurers face similar issues. Walter Russell Mead knows why:

American health care costs too much. Solving this problem isn’t just about litigating the merits of Obamacare or Trumpcare; it’s about ensuring that the American people have access to the health care they want and need while keeping the country solvent.

We can’t do this all at once by some mighty government fiat—or, for that matter, through a blind faith in private markets. It took two generations for us to work ourselves into our present mess, and it will take time to work our way back to a sane and sustainable system.

I would quibble with the term "blind faith," but we can set that aside. The Econ 101 issue of scarcity is not going away, but Mead has a few ideas that would help:

Some promising areas for future policy innovation include: regulatory reforms that encourage disruptive forms of health care delivery, tort reform that eliminates the distortions that “defensive medicine” imposes on the system, and efforts to “push competencies down”—with help from computer assisted diagnostics, for example, registered nurses (RNs) can do more things that only doctors could do well in the past, and licensed practical nurses (LPNs) can do things that used to require RNs.

To a large extent, this is already happening. A typical visit to a doctor's office usually means much more time spent with a nurse than with the doctor. My doctor spends more time in a typical visit with data entry than with conducting an actual examination, while the nurse does most of the heavy lifting. I'm supposed to be a human being, but for most of these transactions I'm just that, a transaction. If the majority of the work can be handled by an RN or LPN, that's how it will be handled. And documentation rules the terms of the transaction.

We can spend hours in the weeds on these issues. And we probably will.

Posse Comeytatus

Comey is gone. You can find a million links to the story, so I won't bother. My thoughts:

• I was nine years old, almost 10, when the Saturday Night Massacre took place. It was actually on my brother's 7th birthday. By the time Nixon moved against Archibald Cox, there was ample evidence of criminal activity. At this point, there is no evidence of criminal activity at all, at least on behalf of the Trump administration, especially in terms of a coverup. As a result, comparing what happened today, right in the middle of the news cycle, with the cynical move that Nixon made on a Saturday night, when he hoped no one would pay attention, is asinine. It's simply not an apt comparison, especially since Trump's attorney general and his deputy were the ones who made the recommendation. Not analogous in the least.
• As far as the Democrats are concerned, Comey has been a hero and a goat and a hero and a goat and now, apparently, a hero, because he's been given the pipe. I don't think he's either, actually. He's a bureaucrat trying to survive, but he'd long overrun his headlights in a deep, deep wood. I'm pretty sure Obama would have given Comey the pipe, too, but he didn't feel like he could get by with it, because he thought it would jeopardize the Clinton campaign. As it turned out, Obama was protecting something that was doomed, anyway.
• The largest problem with Comey was his approach to his job -- he's an investigator, not a prosecutor, so his regular pronouncements about whether criminal charges were warranted in the Clinton email case were, to put it mildly, outrageous. I understand why Comey did speak up on the case initially -- Loretta Lynch was clearly in the bag for Clinton and the meeting she had with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac in Phoenix was astonishingly improper. It was equally improper for Comey to render a judgment on whether charges were warranted. The right approach would have been to let Lynch kill the investigation, and then resign his position out of principle. That was what Elliot Richardson and William Ruckleshaus did in 1973. Comey apparently wasn't that principled. He tried to split the difference and it did not work.
• I see that John McCain, who still hates Trump, is now calling for an independent committee on the Russia business, while Chuck Schumer is calling for a special prosecutor. If I were Trump, I would name McCain the prosecutor and let him go full Captain Queeg on the deal. It would get McCain's butt out of the Senate and would allow the governor of Arizona to appoint a more coherent replacement in the Senate. If my suspicions are correct, Trump doesn't have anything to fear, because if Trump had done something untoward, we'd have found out about it a long time ago. Trump has very few friends in Washington, even in his own party, and there are probably thousands of people who would love to give him the shiv.
• My guess on what happens next? Trump will be okay. The more time Chuck Schumer spends in front of a microphone with his sonorous blathering, the better. If Trump is truly interested in clearing the decks, he ought to fire the odious IRS Commissioner John Koskinen next. He ought to then have Sessions turn loose some of his deputies to take a real look into what's been going on at the IRS for the last 8 years. I guarantee that if he did that, some bureaucrat would take his revenge on Trump by releasing his tax returns, which will actually help Trump. I think in about three months, it will become clear that the Trump administration began in earnest this day.

Schrödinger's Bureaucrat

Comey Comey Comey Comey Comey Chameleon. He comes and goes, he comes and goes:

The FBI has concluded a review of newly-discovered emails related to Hillary Clinton, and sees no reason to change its previous conclusions about Clinton's use of a private server when she was secretary of state, FBI Director James Comey said in a letter to Congress today.

In July, after a year-long investigation, the FBI concluded that charges against Clinton were not warranted, saying agents had not found any evidence that Clinton knowingly sent or received classified information on the server.

On October 28, Comey wrote to Congress that the FBI was going to investigate emails potentially related to Clinton that had been found during an unrelated investigation.

A few thoughts:

• Yesterday I predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the election narrowly and that, shortly thereafter, the FBI would start leaking like a sieve. This result pretty much guarantees it. 
• WikiLeaks (remember that?) isn't done, either. We will have something approaching a full accounting of Clintonworld before too long.
• But does anyone really care? Apparently enough people in this country are okay with the corruption of the Clintons and are willing to pull the lever for them, likely enough to hand Hillary Clinton the presidency.
• As for Comey himself -- who knows what to think? He's a hero, a scoundrel, a hero, a scoundrel. He's a careerist, he's corrupt, he's a crusader, he's a cautious investigator, he's a man of probity, he'd sell his grandmother for a nickel, he's this season's John Roberts. He knows everything, he knows nothing. He's Schrödinger's Bureaucrat.
• Meanwhile, we learned yesterday that among Hillary Clinton's other accomplishments, she was fond of having her maid print out classified emails. As usual, America's Greatest Newspaper had the winning pun:

My life is changing in so many ways I don't know who to trust any more

It's a beautiful world, kids. And on Wednesday, the fun really begins.

The Big Weiner

So, that was a nice little bit of news yesterday from our man James Comey. Let's get the jokes out of the way first:

You've got email

Headless Campaign in Topless Bar

I'm not sure that's going to be enough

The larger issues aren't very funny at all. I have many thoughts about all this. A few:

• So why were so many emails stored on Anthony Weiner's phone, anyway? If anyone knows what Hillary Clinton is capable of, it has to be Huma Abedin, who is in the process of divorcing Weiner. Keeping the emails was Abedin's way to avoid the tires on Hillary's bus. Abedin's mistake was failing to understand her husband's lechery is boundless. 
• Rhetorical question -- what the hell is wrong with a person who would marry Anthony Weiner and work for Hillary Clinton? That's a lot of evil to suss.
• Is there a smoking gun? Yeah, I bet there is. If there are tens of thousands of emails to go through, and they include correspondence between Clinton and Abedin, that's where the dirt is. And Team Clinton and the Democrats know it, which is why they are so furious with Comey.
• Comey is in a bind, to put it mildly. His body language throughout the last few months is a tell -- this is a man who knows he's in an impossible situation. He knows Clinton should have been indicted, but he also knew his bosses weren't going to do it, and he also knew he had to march into the bayonet, which he did. Comey has always had more reason to fear Team Clinton than a feckless Congress, but he also understands that, on his watch, the FBI has become corrupted. The overarching problem with the Clintons has been the same for the quarter-century they have strode the national stage -- they corrupt everything and everyone they touch.
• The linked article from CNN at at the top of this post is being regularly updatd; the top part of the story now details that Loretta Lynch, the rubber stamp speed bump consigliere Attorney General, disagreed with Comey's decision to go forward with a public notification to Congress that the investigation is being reopened. That's a tell. 
• It was also a tell that, in her public pronouncement yesterday, Clinton praised early voting. 
• For his part, Donald Trump has been playing it smarter than he usually does. While I don't expect that to continue, this Trump tweet from 2015 seems prescient:

The Naked Truth

Fasten your seatbelts, everyone!