As James Comey Faces Criminal Probe of His Own Conduct, It’s 2016 All Over Again

It was just nine years ago to the day when the FBI director, James Comey — four months before the 2016 presidential election — stood at a podium to update the press on his bureau’s criminal investigation into the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and her use of personal emails to conduct business when she was serving as secretary of state.“This is going to be an unusual statement in at least a couple of ways,” Mr. Comey warned the press in 2016. What made it most unusual, it turned out, was that he had not coordinated or reviewed his statement “in any way” with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government beforehand.Now, in a reversal of roles, Mr. Comey finds himself on the receiving end of a highly political investigation. This week, the FBI announced it had opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Comey and a former CIA director, John Brennan, over alleged wrongdoing related to their handling of their respective investigations into alleged election interference by Russia in the 2016 presidential election, and whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. In his 2016 press conference, Mr. Comey scolded Mrs. Clinton for being “extremely careless” but said the FBI did not find “clear evidence” that she violated laws by using a private email address and server. He added, “Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”But whether to prosecute wasn’t Mr. Comey’s decision to make. He was, it appeared, upstaging Attorney General Lynch, by seemingly ending the investigation before she could make that determination.Furthermore, announcing that he was not recommending criminal charges, even as he criticized the conduct of the investigation’s subject, was highly irregular and, many legal analysts said, unethical.The move was peak Comey: thrusting himself into a consequential presidential election by launching, and then ending, a highly-publicized investigation in a manner that violated norms. “I’ve heard several people characterize Comey as the ‘knight in shining armor, riding the white stallion.’ He loves the publicity; he loves playing the ethical guy. But in fact, he has no boundaries,” a former FBI deputy assistant director, Scott Nelson, told The New York Sun. Now, Mr. Comey is the focus of a new investigation for alleged crimes that remained unclear Thursday. The FBI viewed Messrs. Brennan and Comey’s alleged interactions as a conspiracy that would open the case up to several potential prosecutorial options, according to reports. Both men have been vilified by President Trump and his supporters as “deep state” actors who they believe attempted to undermine Mr. Trump’s presidency. On Thursday, Senator Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, told Fox News that Messrs. Brennan and Comey were “about as popular as male pattern baldness.”The Sun could not reach FBI representatives for comment Thursday. On Wednesday, Mr. Brennan, who’s been a paid MSNBC contributor for years, told the host Nicolle Wallace that he has “had no contact” with the justice department. He also doubled down on his belief in the soundness of the Russia investigation, and that Mr. Trump needed to “get over it.”News of the investigation into the two men arrived shortly after the FBI director, Kash Patel, his deputy director, Daniel Bongino, and the attorney general, Pam Bondi, received intense scrutiny from those in the MAGA world following the release of a memo confirming the justice department had no evidence of a “client list” belonging to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The memo also confirmed that Epstein killed himself while in his jail cell in 2019, contradicting conspiracy theories surrounding his death that Mr. Bongino had discussed on his podcast, “The Dan Bongino Show,” before joining the FBI.The announcement struck one former FBI official as unorthodox.“I am at a loss for what the strategy is by announcing this to the public. If you’re going to conduct an actual investigation, it generally happens without fanfare. It happens according to an investigative process that is not immediately known to the targets,” a former chief of FBI Science and Tech Programs and director of the U.S. terrorist screening center, Chris Piehota, tells the Sun. Mr. Brennan served as CIA director under President Obama, and since leaving government service has made a career of denouncing Mr. Trump. In addition to writing an anti-Trump book, he also regularly denounces Mr. Trump on MSNBC. Last week, the CIA released an internal review saying it found “multiple procedural anomalies,” including a “highly compressed timeline” and an “excessive involvement of agency heads” in the production of a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment about President Putin’s efforts to influence the 2016 election.In its “lessons-learned” memo, the CIA reported that Mr. Brennan had “tightly restricted access” to a highly classified CIA report that was sourced by the ICA’s authors to confirm Mr. Putin’s efforts.Mr. Ratcliffe’s review did not dispute “the quality and credibility of the highly classified CIA serialized report.” But procedural flaws like the inclusion of the Steele dossier — a salacious and now largely discredited secret report on the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia that was commissioned by operatives linked to Mrs. Clinton — in the ICA “ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgement,” according to the memo.In 2016, the CIA’s deputy director for analysis sent an email to Mr. Brennan warning that the inclusion of the Steele dossier in the ICA risked “the credibility of the entire paper.” “Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness,” according to the memo.“Anyone who has read the Steele dossier can immediately recognize it as junk that has no place in any official government documents nor should it serve as predication for FISA or the initiation of an investigation of a sitting President,” a former FBI assistant director and attorney, Chris Swecker, tells the Sun. It remained unclear what kind of charges could be filed, or where the investigations into Messrs. Brennan and Comey stand. “The disparagement is like a civil defamation, which they should go for, but what needs to be charged is a violation of US Code Title 18. I think it exists. I think they can find it, whether they have the will. And it’s a pretty messy deal,” Mr. Nelson tells the Sun. A representative for Mr. Comey told the Washington Post Wednesday that he had yet to be contacted by investigators. After Mr. Comey posted a picture on his Instagram account on May that depicted “8647” spelled out in seashells, which Mr. Trump’s allies interpreted as a call to have Mr. Trump assassinated, Mr. Comey was reportedly followed by plainclothes law enforcement authorities as he drove to his Washington home from the North Carolina coast.The authorities, who were driving unmarked cars, also tracked Mr. Comey’s cellphone, according to the New York Times. Mr. Comey claimed that he did not understand the multi-faceted meaning of the term “86,” which include refusing a drunk customer service or committing suicide from the Empire State Building’s observation deck on the 86th floor.Mr. Piehota, author of “Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew,” tells the Sun that the justice department runs the risk of falling into the same investigative missteps as Crossfire Hurricane by assigning the case to a team of counter-intelligence investigators.“The failings of Crossfire Hurricane were they didn’t involve the criminal division that provides an offset for how we have to preserve evidence. We have to have certain procedures and protocols in place in case this goes to court. The counterintelligence folks weren’t looking at any of that stuff, really, outside of the political leanings,” Mr. Piehota tells the Sun.Mr. Swecker believes the criminal investigation into Messrs. Brennan and Comey will focus on perjury and possible obstruction of justice, in addition to lying to Congress.“What these two men did is unprecedented. They used their incredible powers invested in their agencies to frame a presidential candidate, and later, president,” Mr. Swecker tells The Sun.

As James Comey Faces Criminal Probe of His Own Conduct, It’s 2016 All Over Again

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