Don’t you love it when people agree with you?
Yesterday I blogged about the fact that former (I’m happier and happier about that “former” designation) FBI Director James Comey was sending out emails with classified data in them. My title:
DID JAMES COMEY USE HIS DEFENSE OF HILLARY CLINTON TO DO THE SAME THING SHE DID?
Well, now we have Investors Business Daily editorializing on exactly the same point. Here are a few key excerpts (but please, please use the link and read it all):
Russia Scandal: No wonder former FBI Director James Comey refused to press charges last summer against Hillary Clinton for her egregious security breaches: It turns out, he may have been guilty of the same thing.
As the inside-the-beltway political publication The Hill reported, more than half of the memos FBI Director James Comey wrote after having spoken to President Trump about the Russia investigation contained classified information. The Hill cites as its sources “officials familiar with the documents.”
All told, Comey wrote seven memos based on nine meetings with Trump. In testimony to Congress, he asserted that he had made sure the memos in question didn’t have classified material. But a subsequent investigation found markings on four of the memos indicating secret information, the kind that is not allowed to be routinely released to the public.
Comey has long maintained that the memos were his personal property, but virtually no legal authority agrees with that. Nor does the FBI, for that matter. The memos were created on government time and related directly to his work, so they were the property of government.
In short, it sounds like a game of cover-your-hindquarters he’s been playing. Because Comey later let outsiders see those memos, and made sure they were leaked to the Trump-hating press, in this case the New York Times, so any protestations of innocence on his part sound more than a little weak.
Let’s be very clear here: What Comey did is against FBI rules, and it’s a violation of federal secrecy laws, on a par with the violation that Hillary Clinton committed when she decided to run the Secretary of State’s office from a private, home-brew email server that was clearly illegal.
This calls into serious question the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to look into the rumors of election meddling by Russia. Comey and Mueller are close friends.
At minimum, Mueller must recuse himself on the Trump matters now before him. His friendship with Comey makes impartiality impossible, and it’s a clear conflict.
In the immortal words of Shrek, when he found out Fiona was an ogre too: “Well…that explains a lot”.
But here’s something that is not explainable…and, pathetically, not a surprise at all: none of the network news shows reported what you just read. I just googled “James Comey memos classified” and, in the first three pages, found nothing from ABC, nothing from NBC and nothing from CBS.
But they’re all journalists. Right? Uh….right?
I contacted ABC, CBS and NBC and asked them why they haven’t reported about the Comey emails, they told me that 1, it was unnamed sources and 2, that it involved classified material.
/s 😉