Comey: Obama's Enabler

[Rightguide]

Picked this up from The Hill this morning:

Good riddance to James Comey, Obama's enabler
BY MATT SCHLAPP, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 05/14/17 02:46 PM EDT

From the article:

"Obama and Comey almost made it all the way to the end of Obama’s term without having a potential political conflict affect their collaboration. That was a major accomplishment considering the abuses carried on by Obama administration: Running a program to spy on adversarial reporters; using the IRS to persecute political opponents in Tea Party nonprofits; overseeing a sloppy program of arming violent criminals along the border; orchestrating a cover-up to blame a YouTube video for the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya; and of course the scandals, wrapped in abuse and surrounded by law breaking, concerning the server, emails and smartphones of former-Secretary Clinton and her enablers.

All of these scandals were managed without the selection of a special prosecutor, without anyone being charged with wrongdoing and without any serious political consequences to President Obama.

The reputations of Clinton and Comey were destroyed due to Clinton’s law breaking and deception and Comey’s apparent desire to be dutiful to the politics of Obama. That was until he decided that his own brand was being tarnished, and so lurched out with the now-infamous “Comey letter.”

Like so many things with President Trump, he made the right decision to ax Comey, but the turbulence and timing caused him to endure a withering week in the press and gave some additional life to a tired, manufactured scandal."

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-bl...7-good-riddance-to-james-comey-obamas-enabler

 

[KingOrfeo]

We all know that's not why he was fired.

 

[Rightguide]

We all know that's not why he was fired.

No we don't, not yet. Only the myth makers on the left know what happened.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Trump has stated various reasons, but none have to do with the OP.

 

[HisArpy]

Trump has stated various reasons, but none have to do with the OP.

Huh?

Nothing in the article OR the OP's post had any mention of why Trump fired Comey.

Instead, the article was a run-down of Comey's career and the Obama administrations scandals that never saw any real daylight while Comey was director of the FBI. It is only at the end where the article says that Trump saw through Comey but it still doesn't give any specific reason WHY Trump fired him.

What's funny is that most of the talking heads all started off by saying that Comey was a "man of honor" and after the email fiasco, just about all of then retracted from that position. Mostly, I think, because Comey revealed himself to everyone. He may be a good lawyer and a good lawyer puts his client first. Unfortunately, a good FBI director puts the law first and the client be damned.

Comey didn't learn that lesson. Instead it seems as if he thought politics was the game to play when it came to facts, evidence, and the law.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Huh?

Nothing in the article OR the OP's post had any mention of why Trump fired Comey.

Then the article is not really relevant to any current events, is it?

 

[HisArpy]

Then the article is not really relevant to any current events, is it?

Funny. I think that an article on the career history of the man in the news is quite relevant to current events. Without it, we wouldn't know a thing about Comey except he was fired by Trump. Without it, the libs would claim it was for obstructionist reasons, while the conservatives would still claim it's because Comey deserved it, and the rest of middle America thinks that both of those wing-nut lunatic factions should give it a rest already.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Funny. I think that an article on the career history of the man in the news is quite relevant to current events. Without it, we wouldn't know a thing about Comey except he was fired by Trump. Without it, the libs would claim it was for obstructionist reasons, while the conservatives would still claim it's because Comey deserved it, and the rest of middle America thinks that both of those wing-nut lunatic factions should give it a rest already.

Well, failure to prosecute the non-scandals named in the OP is no important part of Comey's history.

 

[phrodeau]

Funny. I think that an article on the career history of the man in the news is quite relevant to current events. Without it, we wouldn't know a thing about Comey except he was fired by Trump. Without it, the libs would claim it was for obstructionist reasons, while the conservatives would still claim it's because Comey deserved it, and the rest of middle America thinks that both of those wing-nut lunatic factions should give it a rest already.

Is Donald Trump's career history relevant to current events? His past has more checkers than Nixon's.

 

[KingOrfeo]

"Obama and Comey almost made it all the way to the end of Obama’s term without having a potential political conflict affect their collaboration. That was a major accomplishment considering the abuses carried on by Obama administration: Running a program to spy on adversarial reporters;

Never heard of that before; googling "obama spied on reporters" turns up nothing.

using the IRS to persecute political opponents in Tea Party nonprofits;

Obama was never connected with that, and:

In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder.

Initial reports described the selections as nearly exclusively of conservative groups with terms such as "Tea Party" in their names. According to Republican lawmakers, liberal-leaning groups and the Occupy movement had also triggered additional scrutiny, but at a lower rate than conservative groups. The Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee issued a report, which concluded that although some liberal groups were selected for additional review, the scrutiny that these groups received did not amount to targeting when compared to the greater scrutiny received by conservative groups. The report was criticized by the committee's Democratic minority, which said that the report ignored evidence that the IRS used keywords to identify both liberal and conservative groups.

In January 2014, the FBI told Fox News that its investigation had found no evidence so far warranting the filing of federal criminal charges in connection with the controversy, as it had not found any evidence of "enemy hunting", and that the investigation continued. On October 23, 2015, the Justice Department declared that no criminal charges would be filed.

So the FBI did look into it.

overseeing a sloppy program of arming violent criminals along the border;

That might have been an ill-advised operation (begun under W), but what was Comey to do? No indictable crimes were involved, and the ATF is not under the FBI.

orchestrating a cover-up to blame a YouTube video for the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya;

As for that:

On September 16, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice appeared on five major interview shows to discuss the attacks. Prior to her appearance, Rice was provided with "talking points" from a CIA memo,[174] which stated:

The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.

This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and as currently available information continues to be evaluated. The investigation is ongoing, and the U.S. government is working with Libyan authorities to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of U.S. citizens.[175]

Using these talking points as a guide, Rice stated:

Based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy—sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that— in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent. We do not—we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned. I think it's clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself I think is one of the things we'll have to determine.[176][177][178][179][180]

In a White House press briefing on September 18, press secretary Jay Carney explained the attack to reporters: "I'm saying that based on information that we—our initial information, and that includes all information—we saw no evidence to back up claims by others that this was a preplanned or premeditated attack; that we saw evidence that it was sparked by the reaction to this video. And that is what we know thus far based on the evidence, concrete evidence."[181]

On September 20, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney answered a question about an open hearing with the National Counterterrorism Center Director, Matthew G. Olsen, which referenced which extremist groups might have been involved. Carney said, "It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. Our embassy was attacked violently, and the result was four deaths of American officials. So, again, that's self-evident."[182] On the same day, during an appearance on Univision, a Spanish-language television network in the United States, President Obama stated, "What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests."[183][184][185][186][187]

Whatever you call that, it ain't a coverup -- nor something the FBI would have investigated in any case. Congress investigated it -- quite a lot -- and could find no there there.

and of course the scandals, wrapped in abuse and surrounded by law breaking, concerning the server, emails and smartphones of former-Secretary Clinton and her enablers.

And as to that:

Long story short, most politicians are technophobes. Some of the State Department's emails contained highly-classified information that was sent from an insecure server. Later on, somebody dug up a policy, blew some dust off it and discovered that what everyone was doing was against official regs, effectively saying Hey, stop using your smartphones and go back to using state e-mail.[160][161][162] This memo was about as popular as the plague and went conveniently ignored.[163]

BlackBerrys caught on with politicians back when they were the top mobile company. That peculiarity never really went away.[164] Obama was granted a secure BlackBerry like he requested, as was Condoleezza Rice, the previous SoS. Clinton was repeatedly denied one as it was too much of a security risk and they wanted to phase it out.[165] (In exchange, the NSA offered her this monstrosity.[166]) She could have had two devices, one for state.gov (which, based on the Mills deposition, can be accessed from State-issued mobile devices[167]) and one for her private email. That would have given her more protection, since she could say everything on her private server is personal, everything on the state.gov server is 'work.' Clinton stupidly used only one of each (at home![168]), because didn't want to have to partition conversations between different devices and addresses.

Even the State Department IG report mentioned how inadequate their digital infrastructure is: For example, Colin Powell justified his use of a private email address, saying, "State's system at the time was inadequate."[169] State's e-mail has been hacked extensively by Russia, and they didn't get around to scrubbing it for months (perhaps Russia is still balls-deep in the network as we speak?). There is also no money to fix it. One of Clinton's e-mail exchanges in 2011 concerning how inadequate State Dept. technology was. The Department's Director of Policy Planning wrote to Clinton and her aides:

I’m sure you’ve thought of this, but it would be a great time for someone inside or outside to make a statement/ write an op-ed that points out that State’s technology is so antiquated that NO ONE uses a State-issued laptop and even high officials routinely end up using their home email accounts to be able to get their work done quickly and effectively. Further cuts to State’s budget just makes matters much much worse. We actually need more funds to significantly upgrade our technology.[170]

And Clinton agreed. They discussed strategy to get more funding to improve things, but didn't want to go public with it for fear of alerting enemies to another snafu. It doesn't seem to be an isolated issue: The current SoS, John Kerry, was caught in December still using a private email account.[171] There's a long Daily Show segment (actually, several segments) covering in detail the complete inadequacy of the computer systems at the Department of Veterans Affairs and how it's made their job effectively impossible and defied any attempts to fix it.[172]

Slashing government funding has consequences, even if they're not immediate. In retrospect, it was brilliant on Republicans' part, because she gets blamed for a lot of the fallout, e.g. cutting funding for embassy security after Clinton warned them that it would affect national security (but that's another topic.)

So why not just use a state.gov address? Well, here's where FOIA may come into play. Clinton is a paranoid person,[173] mostly because she has been under constant scrutiny for the last quarter-century. Most of those investigations have included FOIA requests. The Freedom of Information Act can perform its transparency function only when government employees follow the e-mail guidelines.[174] Clinton supporter and former Governor and senator of Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, is disturbed by the email scandal: “It is about wanting to avoid the reach of citizens using FOIA to find out what their government is doing, and then not telling the truth about why she did.”[175] Though, she likely hasn't done anything criminal,[176] her subsequent improper deletion of 30,000 emails violated the Federal Records ActWikipedia's W.svg.[177] The FBI conducted a criminal investigation into this matter and it appears that the use of the private server violates several federal criminal statutes.

On July 5, 2016, FBI director James Comey issued a statement that said that Clinton's use of the server was 'careless', but that no criminal charges had been recommended:[178]

Comey said that the FBI could not find a case in the past that would support bringing criminal charges based upon the facts. The bureau did not find clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information or vast quantities of materials, or indications of disloyalty to the U.S. or efforts to obstruct justice.

More or less torpedoing the idea that blanket punishments should be applied severely and across all avenues of life.

Just days before election day, Comey thought that it would be a swell idea forego the Justice Department's standards of election non-intervention to inform Congress of the discovery of new emails that could be "pertinent" to their previous investigation. This spurred a week-long media speculation-fest on what the emails could be, though they mostly turned out to be duplicates.[179]

So Comey did investigate the matter, and handled it just right. In fact, he let the world know he was still looking into it on the eve of the election. I can't see any derelictions on his part in connection with any of these.

 

[Rightguide]

Well, failure to prosecute the non-scandals named in the OP is no important part of Comey's history.

It would be if there were a Republican President were in office at the time.

 

[KingOrfeo]

It would be if there were a Republican President were in office at the time.

Don't see how.

 

[Rightguide]

Never heard of that before; googling "obama spied on reporters" turns up nothing.

That's because you can't read. It turns up this:

http://theweek.com/articles/464430/why-did-obama-administration-spy-associated-press

http://libertynews.com/2014/11/proof-obama-administration-spied-on-reporter-sharyl-attkisson/

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/6...r-email-calls-online-searches/article/2559854

 

[Rightguide]

Never heard of that before; googling "obama spied on reporters" turns up nothing.



Obama was never connected with that, and:



So the FBI did look into it.



That might have been an ill-advised operation (begun under W), but what was Comey to do? No indictable crimes were involved, and the ATF is not under the FBI.



As for that:



Whatever you call that, it ain't a coverup -- nor something the FBI would have investigated in any case. Congress investigated it -- quite a lot -- and could find no there there.





And as to that:



So Comey did investigate the matter, and handled it just right. In fact, he let the world know he was still looking into it on the eve of the election. I can't see any derelictions on his part in connection with any of these.

You don't know if Comey investigated it properly or not. There's good evidence that Comey was going to let Clinton off the hook no matter what she did. You will notice when he did finally interview her it wasn't under oath, Cheryl Mills was allowed to sit in on it as her attorney despite the fact that she was culpable and a possible suspect herself, everyone involved was given immunity, and their electronic hard drives and devices allowed to be destroyed. Comey's behavior was a joke and far from proper. We'll see what happens with a new Director and DOJ.

 

[KingOrfeo]

That's because you can't read. It turns up this:

http://theweek.com/articles/464430/why-did-obama-administration-spy-associated-press

http://libertynews.com/2014/11/proof-obama-administration-spied-on-reporter-sharyl-attkisson/

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/6...r-email-calls-online-searches/article/2559854

The first link describes nothing illegal, nor does it connect the matter to Obama.

The Associated Press on Monday revealed that the Department of Justice had secretly spied on AP reporters, obtaining two months' worth of telephone records in what was most likely an attempt to crack down on internal leaks.

As for the second, I comfortably dismiss anything called "Liberty News" as a source. Googling "Sharyl Attkisson spied on" turns up only one first-page hit from a real newspaper, and that describes nothing illegal, though it does say she has a lawsuit going.

The third is simply an opinion poll of reporters, and again describes nothing illegal.

Don't see what Comey should have done about any of that.

 

[Disgustipated]

You don't know if Comey investigated it properly or not. There's good evidence that Comey was going to let Clinton off the hook no matter what she did. You will notice when he did finally interview her it wasn't under oath, Cheryl Mills was allowed to sit in on it as her attorney despite the fact that she was culpable and a possible suspect herself, everyone involved was given immunity, and their electronic hard drives and devices allowed to be destroyed. Comey's behavior was a joke and far from proper. We'll see what happens with a new Director and DOJ.

Your first two sentences only spotlights what a lame pile of hypocritical crap you are.

 

[water505]

We all know that's not why he was fired.

We all know???

Dude, what is it with you?

 

[KingOrfeo]

We all know???

Dude, what is it with you?

All as in "the whole world." Including you. Not even Trump says he fired Comey for anything mentioned in the OP.

 

[water505]

All as in "the whole world." Including you. Not even Trump says he fired Comey for anything mentioned in the OP.

Oh, so now you know what the whole world thinks. You're a delusional schmuck.

 

[Sean]

Benghazi!!!

 

[KingOrfeo]

Oh, so now you know what the whole world thinks. You're a delusional schmuck.

If you want to know what people think, you take a poll.

But among poll respondents, 46% said they either strongly or somewhat agreed Trump had terminated Comey to slow down the FBI probe surrounding his campaign — while 38% said they agreed with the Clinton email narrative.

But the "Clinton email narrative" is that Trump fired Comey for treating Clinton unfairly, not for failing to indict her.

 

[Sean]

Meanwhile, of course, Trump is freely giving state secrets to the Russians.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...9_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.e4c733f59186

 

[Sean]

I mean, who needs to hack a private email server when the POTUS will just give you top secret info? Saves all the hassle!

 

[KingOrfeo]

Meanwhile, of course, Trump is freely giving state secrets to the Russians.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...9_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.e4c733f59186

McMaster is nonplussed.

 

[Rightguide]

The first link describes nothing illegal, nor does it connect the matter to Obama.



As for the second, I comfortably dismiss anything called "Liberty News" as a source. Googling "Sharyl Attkisson spied on" turns up only one first-page hit from a real newspaper, and that describes nothing illegal, though it does say she has a lawsuit going.

The third is simply an opinion poll of reporters, and again describes nothing illegal.

Don't see what Comey should have done about any of that.

You're an idiot. Those stories are well known, This from the WaPo:

Dana Milbank: In AP, Rosen investigations, government makes criminals of reporters


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...7aba60512a7_story.html?utm_term=.c3bb4b155d4f

Sharyl Attkisson's story here:

Read the words of Federal Judge Emet Sullivan’s recent order transferring Attkisson’s suit:

http://www.activistpost.com/2017/04/bombshell-far-obama-spying-go-sharyl-attkisson-case.html