By Rich Lowry
Monday, December 16, 2019
Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton gave us “it depends upon
what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” James Comey has now given us it depends
what the meaning of “vindicated” is.
The former FBI director sat down with Chris Wallace of Fox
News Sunday over the weekend, and it didn’t go well. Wallace repeatedly
pressed Comey on critical findings in the Horowitz IG report, and Comey
shimmied and dodged, in a master class in slipperiness and evasion.
To this point, Comey has tended to get away with a lot in
media interviews, for several reasons — he has known more about the
investigations in question than anyone interviewing him; not much objective,
uncontested information about those matters was publicly available; and his
interviewers tended to be sympathetic to the point, at times, of sycophancy.
All of these advantages were eroded or nonexistent on
Sunday. The Horowitz report has dumped a prodigious amount of material about
the investigations out into the public. While Chris Wallace obviously isn’t a
law-enforcement professional, he knows the factual record and, as one of the
best interviewers on TV, was relentless, yet fair in grilling Comey.
It’s important to give credit to Comey for at least
admitting that his previous fulsome statements defending the FISA process were
wrong. He’s also on strong ground pushing back against the over-the-top charges
against the FBI by the president and his defenders, often put in absurdly
inflammatory terms. (Trump just the other day referred to former FBI officials
as “scum.”)
But throughout the interview, Comey sought to minimize
what had gone wrong in 2016, fighting a rearguard action on behalf of a
position no longer worthy of defense.
Off the bat, Wallace juxtaposed Comey’s claim that the IG
report was a vindication with Michael Horowitz’s congressional testimony that
no one who had anything to do with the FBI’s handling of the investigation
should feel vindicated.
Hence, Comey’s posture, “Well, maybe it turns upon how we
understand the word.”
He relied repeatedly on such mincing distinctions.
Questioned how he can square his past statement that the Steele dossier was
“part of a broader mosaic of facts” supporting the Carter Page FISA application
with Horowitz’s finding that it was “central and essential” in deciding to seek
the FISA order, Comey said there was no contradiction.
This is absurd. It’s true that the application literally
had other things in it. But Comey’s “mosaic” characterization clearly minimized
the role of the dossier, whereas the Horowitz report finds that the FISA
application “relied entirely” on information from the Steele reports regarding
Carter Page’s alleged coordination with the Russians. The report also notes
that Justice Department officials “accepted the FBI’s decision to move forward
with the application, based substantially on the Steele information.”
As for the Steele dossier itself, Comey rejected
Wallace’s statement that the FBI had concluded early in 2017 that it was
“bunk.” According to Comey, “they didn’t conclude the reporting from Steele was
bunk; they concluded there were significant questions about the reliability of
some of the sub-source reporting.”
Oh. In other words, Comey is trying to say the reporting
wasn’t bunk, just its underlying sources. How does this make any sense? Comey’s
right, by the way, that the FBI didn’t dismiss the accuracy of the Steele
dossier, although this isn’t a point in the agency’s favor. According to
Horowitz, the CIA and FBI argued about what weight to give the dossier, and the
CIA, in the words of an FBI official, considered it on the level of “Internet
rumor.” Not only did the FBI put undue credence in it; the agency kept key
information undermining its contentions from the FISA court.
In this connection, Comey pushed back against a Wallace
question about an FBI attorney changing a document to hide Carter Page’s
exculpatory, cooperative relationship with the CIA by saying that Horowitz
didn’t find “misconduct by any FBI people.” When Wallace pointed out that the
attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, has been referred for possible prosecution, Comey
replied, “That’s not been resolved,” as if it can’t be misconduct unless and
until Clinesmith is charged and found guilty of a crime.
Comey danced around Horowitz’s statement in congressional
testimony, cited by Wallace, that the explanation for the FBI’s conduct is
either incompetence or intentionality. Comey replied that Horowitz didn’t
“conclude” it was intentional, which is correct but evades the import of the
inspector general saying that it indeed might have been intentional. (Comey
takes great umbrage at Bill Barr making the same point as Horowitz, although in
starker terms.)
The former FBI director puts great weight on yet another
distinction that is laughable by any reasonable standard. He says that the
Trump campaign wasn’t being investigated, just four people associated with it.
But this wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t as though they were all under
investigation for disparate, random things. The FBI was probing whether they
were conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election. To pretend this had nothing
to do with the campaign is completely ridiculous.
In sum, based on his performance with Chris Wallace, it’s
safe to doubt the reliability of James Comey’s definition of “vindicated.”
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