The Case Against James Comey

[swag]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/james-comey-fbi-accountability-214234

Not since Hoover has an FBI director shown such a lack of accountability.

By Riley Roberts

With hard, hooded eyes and a pugilistic bearing, J. Edgar Hoover’s official portrait glowers—face fixed in a bulldog scowl—down the hallways of the FBI’s Washington headquarters. Even the building itself—a crumbling brutalist cathedral, windowless at street level and wreathed in security cameras—seems to evoke something of the man, its namesake, who bent the bureau to his will during the terms of eight presidents, from Coolidge to Nixon.

Hoover never so much as crossed the threshold of the office where his latest successor, James Comey, now works. Yet the edifice and the institution remain haunted by Hoover’s legacy of unchecked power, which rendered him judge, jury and executioner of anyone who came into his sights.

The FBI’s history is divided into two distinct epochs: Hoover and post-Hoover. After Hoover’s death in office in 1972, Congress enacted laws designed to curtail the abuses—from illegal wiretaps and “black bag” jobs to campaigns of intimidation and blackmail—that defined his 48-year reign. Of the six directors who have followed, all but one have projected far lower profiles, eschewing the dramatic assertions of power that made Hoover so dangerous. Only James Comey, the seventh and current FBI director, has strayed from this well-worn path.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/james-comey-fbi-accountability-214234#ixzz4JzgxNbwt
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[napi21]

1. There's ONE paragraph that resonated with me. Comey interjects his influence

into almost all presidential decisions. Then this quote!

Since taking office, Comey has repeatedly injected his views into executive branch deliberations on issues such as sentencing reform and the roots of violence against police officers. He has undermined key presidential priorities such as crafting a coherent federal policy on cybersecurity and encryption. Most recently, he shattered longstanding precedent by publicly offering his own conclusions about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email. (The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.)

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/james-comey-fbi-accountability-214234#ixzz4JziowA2n
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook


I knew what he did the day he read the FBI decision not to charge Hillary, there was something very strange about his interjecting his own opinions, but I didn't realize he does this all the damn time! I can only hope Hillary replaces him!

[Cicada]

3. The FBI director can't be fired, same as Fed reserve chairman

[Moliere]

4. Didn't know that and that sucks

[ANOIS]

5. Same with Supreme Court Justices.

[underpants]

2. Very good article

[SunSeeker]

6. K & R

[Bill USA]

7. great post. excellent article.

(my emphasis)

By and large, Justice Department lawyers have declined to criticize Comey in public, for fear of angering the FBI director. But in personal conversations and expletive-laden email threads, many were apoplectic at his handling of the Clinton case. One aide described senior officials who should have been involved in the announcement scrambling to watch it on television. Some were particularly incensed by the editorial commentary sprinkled throughout Comey’s statement. As Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on the blog Lawfare: “There is something horrible about watching a senior government official, who has used the coercive investigative capacities of the federal government, make public judgments about a subject's conduct which the Justice Department is not prepared to indict.”

In fact, according to Miller, this public recounting of evidence—which the FBI was unwilling to submit to adversarial testing in a courtroom—may have run afoul of Justice Department rules. Over the past several decades, strict guidelines have been adopted to prevent investigative findings (which are not introduced in court) from becoming fodder for extrajudicial smear campaigns—like the ones Hoover carried out against public figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“To get up there and start moralizing about your opinion on what you think happened—and what should have been done and shouldn’t have been done—is not the job of the FBI director,” says Akerman. “It is not [even] the job of a prosecutor with the Department of Justice, and it's totally out of school. He has no business doing that.” Indeed, this transgression alone, committed by a government lawyer—or by any of Comey’s agents—would have invited official reprimand. But there is virtually no one who can reprimand an FBI director.

In the final analysis, what is most troubling about Comey’s handling of the Clinton email case is not the fact that it represents an escalation of an established pattern—or even that there is no mechanism for preventing a repeat performance. What is most troubling is that, at its core, the whole affair had relatively little to do with Hillary Clinton. It was, in Comey’s own words, a “way to maximize” his agency’s reputation: a bid to advance not the interests of justice, but the interests of James Comey.

Comey's statement: "There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation."

... Is right out of Joe McCarthy's playbook. McCarthy said: "I have a list."... supposedly of Communist sympathizers in the Government which he never showed anybody. He just held up hos supposed list and waved it around.