“A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself.” So wrote the great Roman historian Titus Livius (59 B.C.-17 A.D.), better known to us moderns as Livy. Former FBI Director James Comey may do well to keep Livy’s observation in mind, as there is ample evidence that he has engaged in colossal fraud, deceit, and treachery. For the moment he is riding high, already well on his way to fame and fortune: a book deal worth over $2 million, glowing reviews in the New York Times and the rest of the establishment media, and of course, obsequious “interviews” by network anchors and star reporters of flagship newspapers.
Even before his highly hyped inaugural network interview with ABC’s 20/20, on Sunday, April 15, Comey did a pre-book release sit-down video and print interview with USA Today’s Susan Page and Kevin Johnson, in which he previewed many of the scathing charges he would level at President Trump in subsequent media appearances. According to certain opinion polls, Comey is viewed by the American public as more trustworthy than President Trump, the man who fired him. Sweet revenge. To top it off, according to the All-American Speakers Bureau, the ex-FBI chief now commands a speaking fee of $100,000-200,000 per event. So Comey can now rake in more in a single speech than he did in a whole year at his top FBI salary ($185,000). With a non-stop Big Media interview circuit underway, his speaker fees can only go up, perhaps even to the Hillary Clinton level ($325,000 per event).
In his interviews and in his book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, James Comey presents himself as a pillar of rectitude, an innocent, honest man heroically standing up against a lying, immoral, White House bully — President Donald Trump — whom he compares to a mafia boss. The selection of ABC’s George Stephanopoulos as his first interviewer was, assuredly, a deliberate decision, with an eye toward getting the friendliest interview possible on a mainstream platform. Stephanopoulos did not disappoint Comey and his promoters; his treatment was powder puff, not bare knuckles. The ABC anchor was the chummy cheerleader for a pal, not a professional journalist asking the types of serious, probing questions one would expect for someone such as Comey, who is leveling serious charges and slimy innuendo against the president of the United States — while carrying considerable baggage of his own. Stephanopoulos conveniently never mentioned Comey’s baggage (which we’ll get to momentarily). Naturally. Nor did Stephanopoulos bother to disclose to viewers that he is far from being an unbiased observer. Indeed, he is a lifelong Democrat, and has been an advisor to the Democratic Party, as well as serving as White House communications director and senior advisor to President Bill Clinton. He has remained a close friend of Bill and Hillary, was a big Hillary supporter in the last election, and caused a conflict-of-interest scandal at ABC in 2015 for failing to disclose that he had donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Stephanopoulos’ wife, Hollywood actress Ali Wentworth (famous for flashing her breasts on Jimmy Kimmel Live), declared that the Stephanopoulos family would be moving to Australia if Trump won. Alas, as with all the other emotive glitterati who made similar faithless pledges to depart our shores if the red MAGA wave prevailed at the polls, they stayed, and we continue to suffer their self-righteous blatherings.
In view of the fact that Comey — in his book and in his interviews — states that President Trump “lies constantly,” and inasmuchas Comey constantly brandishes honesty as his touchstone virtue, Stephanopoulos could have (and should have) asked the former FBI head to explain his own problems with veracity. After all, Comey put “Truth” and “Lies” in Klieg lights on his book cover’s subtitle. As just one example, of which Stephanopoulos is surely aware, Comey lied about leaking to the press. During televised testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May, 2017, Committee Chairman Charles Grassley asked Comey if he had ever leaked information. Comey’s immediate reply: “Never!” Senator Grassley pushed further, asking if he had authorized anyone else to leak information to the press regarding the FBI’s investigation. “No,” was his terse response. To put the questions and responses in context, this came at a time when persons within the D.C. “Swamp” were leaking information on a daily basis to damage the new Trump administration, a practice that has continued. “If I find out that people were leaking information about our investigations, whether to reporters or to private parties, there’ll be severe consequences,” Comey pledged.
Later, however, before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey admitted that he had leaked a memo of his privileged conversation with President Trump. “I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter,” Comey said. That friend turned out to be Columbia University Law Professor Daniel Richman. The reporter worked for the New York Times. Comey said he leaked the document “because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel” — which, of course, it did. The Times ran with the Comey-Richman leak, and the rest of the media shills jumped on the bandwagon, ginning up a fake public outcry for an investigation into “Russian collusion” and “obstruction.” Robert Mueller — a comrade of Comey at the FBI and DOJ — was appointed as special counsel the day after the Times story broke.
But Comey didn’t leak just once, he leaked at least four times — that we know about thus far. And at least one of those leaks, according to Senator Grassley, involved classified information. On January 3, 2018, Senator Grassley raised questions about when the memos memorializing interactions between former FBI Director James Comey and President Trump were classified and the chain of custody for the classified memos.
“After a review of the seven memoranda created by former Director Comey, it is now clear that four are marked classified at various levels of sensitivity,” Grassley said in a press statement. “Former Director Comey reportedly provided copies of four memos to Columbia Law School Professor Daniel Richman. If true, that would mean at least one disclosed memo contained information now-marked classified.”
On the same day, January 3, the senator sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, asking for responses to 14 important questions about the Comey memos, their classifications, and the way they have been handled. Stephanopoulos — and the other selected media interviewers — could have asked Comey about these pertinent issues, but instead have merely operated as facilitators for Comey’s attacks on President Trump.
James Comey not only leaked the memos to the New York Times, but has talked about them openly in his interviews and in his book. Yet if Senator Grassley, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wants to read these memos, he is required to go to a secure room, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at the Office of Senate Security. Ditto for any other member of Congress, the elected representatives of the American people. As with their stonewalling on so many other related matters, the FBI and DOJ, still filled with Obama holdovers, are doing everything possible to foil and undermine the Trump administration.
Rod Rosenstein, of course, is the man who appointed Robert Mueller (who, like Comey, is a former FBI chief) to be special counsel in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation. However, as former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy and other legal experts have pointed out, Rosenstein has failed to properly limit, according to the Department of Justice’s own regulation, the scope of the investigation, and has failed to rein in what many critics have rightly called Mueller’s “fishing expedition.” Or as President Trump calls it, a “witch hunt.” Rosenstein also signed off on the very problematical FISA warrants that were used by the Obama administration to spy on Donald Trump.
The Leakers, Liars Club
James Comey’s sanctimonious narrative has been further undercut by the actions and claims of his underling, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Like Comey, McCabe deviously leaked information to the press, and then denied it. And then, after getting caught, justified it. McCabe’s credibility, already in tatters, was further demolished with the recent release of the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General report on McCabe.
Among other things, the OIG report exposes McCabe’s duplicity not only in leaking information to the press, but then denying it and attempting to shift attention and blame to other underlings who were innocent of these dealings. Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a member of the Justice and the Oversight and Government Reform committees, has been a longtime critic of McCabe. On April 16, on the Laura Ingraham Show, he lambasted McCabe’s deceit. “To cover his own tracks, the next day when this story is printed, he calls up the assistant director in charge of the Washington field division and the assistant director in the New York office — he calls them up and yells at them, and says, ‘What are you guys doing leaking information?’” Jordan said. “Think about that. He sends someone out to do it and then he’s blaming someone else.”
The problem for Comey is that McCabe claims he committed the leaks with his boss’s knowledge. Comey denies that. So it’s he said versus he said. When you have two proven liars accusing each other of lying, what do you do? Well, you just give the other liar a lucrative book deal also, and put him on the gravy train speech circuit too, right? That hasn’t happened yet, but we shouldn’t be surprised if we hear something along those lines in the near future.
“James the Righteous”
James Comey’s unctuous sanctimony is made all the more off-putting by his very transparent effort to smear President Trump at every opportunity, using devious innuendo when not accusing him outright. Perhaps the most notable example is his repeated references to the sordid (and discredited) “Steele dossier,” the “Trump-Russia” hit-piece financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which among other things, came up with the fantastical claim that Donald Trump had engaged in a disgusting urine romp in a Russian hotel on a bed that had been slept in by Barack and Michelle Obama.
Questioned about the fake “dossier” during his Senate testimony, Comey characterized it as “salacious and unverified.” Yet he continues to salaciously reference it in order to advance his charge that President Trump is “morally unfit” to lead the nation. “I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the — the — current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,” Comey said In his ABC interview. “It’s possible, but I don’t know.”
It’s also “possible” James Comey is a pornography addict and a pedophile, and that there are photographs and video recordings to prove it. And if that “possible” charge were repeated a sufficient number of times on major media platforms, it would acquire a certain “factual” status in many minds. Which is precisely what Comey and his Deep State co-conspirators intend.
However, despite the massive promotional rollout and adoring reviews salted throughout the controlled media, not everyone is totally smitten with the Comey mystique. Surprisingly, even a few journalists in the major media have broken loose from the rigid group-think to register some less-than-enamored takes of Comey’s smarmy facade. In her interview with Comey, NBC’s Today host Savannah Guthrie, for instance, challenged him on being vindictive, “bitter,” and “catty” in his personal slights of President Trump. Comey tried to slough it off, but Guthrie returned again and again, pressing him about getting into the “gutter” and asking him if he didn’t feel that he had “diminished” himself by his mudslinging. Although she failed to delve into Comey’s lying and leaking record, Guthrie’s interview was a welcome relief in that it showed not every single talking head on the network news programs is marching in party-line lockstep.
Time to prosecute Comey, McCabe, Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch
Livy may yet be proven right, and those who appear to be untouchable now may soon have their fraudulent deeds exposed. Some members of Congress are pushing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to initiate investigations for the prosecution of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Agent Peter Strzok, FBI Counsel Lisa Page — and others. On April 18, Representative Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) announced that he and 10 of his House colleagues had sent a letter to Sessions urging him to start the process, citing the massive evidence that is already available. “The political elite are not immune from the rule of law, and those in positions of high authority should be treated the same as any other American,” DeSantis said. “We ask that the Department of Justice move swiftly to ensure that violations of federal statutes by high officials are identified and prosecuted.”
Image of James Comey: Screenshot of YouTube video by The View
