Donald Trump and James Comey at the White House on January 22, 2017: Shutterstock

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

As an educated lawyer, former FBI director James Comey should know the Latin legal phrase, “Fiat justitia ruat caelum,” which means: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” He apparently forget that under the pressure of the election in 2016 and in trying to serve President Donald John Trump in 2017.

I don’t want to “Seacrest” the lede, so let me go ahead and say this at the outset and then offer an explaination.

If the FBI — or the press — knows something the American people should know before an election that might have an impact on the outcome of the election, then they should just put the information out there and let the chips fall where they may. I learned this the hard way nearly 30 years go (see below).

If on the face of it this seems to let Comey off the hook for his disclosure of reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails just days before the 2016 election, that’s not the point I want to make. It’s complicated.

By now most people will know about the interview with Comey that aired Sunday on ABC News with George Stephanopoulos. If you are more than casually interested, read the transcript carefully. There’s lots of stuff that did not make in on the air.

If you really want to dig into the facts of this story, also check out the New York Times and Washington Post reviews of Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. There are similarities but also key differences in approach.

Let me also recommend a piece just out from Rolling Stone by an author who has written about Comey and Robert Mueller and the FBI and has some unique insights.

While I have studied this story in some depth for the past couple of years and read and watched all this coverage with an objective eye, it seems clear to me that Comey is an idealist whose belief in American democracy is admirable and I believe he is doing his utmost to tell the truth. Yet his faith in the independence of the FBI and the justice system is at the very least naive, if not downright misguided.

He claims to have called a press conference to announce reopening the Clinton email investigation to protect the country from an “illegitimate president,” yet the action itself is credited with being one of the key events that led to an illegitimate president in the election of Donald J. Trump, who Comey compares to a Mob boss and says is “not morally fit to be president of the United States.”

Surely Comey knew that by October 27, 2016, less than two weeks before the election on November 8. But like everybody else in New York and Washington, he thought Hillary Clinton was destined to win. We knew better and said so. If he was interested in justice being served, he would have kept his mouth shut and let the election play out without his intervention.

Comey claims politics had nothing to do with it. But he reveals in his book that his entire family, his wife and five daughters, were for Hillary Clinton and marched to protest Trump after his inauguration, while he has a history of also working for Republican presidents, even concealing facts about the CIA’s torture program during the Iraq war. So why would he think that his statements could do anything to heal our partisan divide? That’s what he seems to be trying to say now.

While I am sympathetic to the argument, I still say he mishandled the situation and deserved to be fired, as I wrote in May, 2017, although perhaps not by the likes of Trump. If Clinton had been elected, she would probably have fired him too for breaking with FBI tradition of not talking about ongoing investigations in such a public way.

In an attempt to rebuild his credibility in a self-deprecating way, he admits his ego could have gotten in the way. I suspect he is right about that.

According to the author Garrett M. Graff in a conclusion I tend to agree with:

The bitter irony now is that Comey finds himself in a position where he is responsible for poking holes in that reservoir of trust, for launching the FBI not once, not twice, but three times in the 2016 election on a path that made the American people question whether the nation’s premier law enforcement agency was, in fact, putting a thumb on the electoral scale and weighing in where it shouldn’t.

That’s a legacy he would have to own today even if Hillary Clinton had won, even if he was still ensconced on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Trump International Hotel. But of course that’s not what happened. And so while the only true villain of Comey’s book is President Trump – the man who bears so much responsibility for exacerbating the nation’s poisonous partisanship and trying to undermine our democratic institutions – James Comey shares blame for putting Trump in a position to do it. Comey’s own sense of duty and lifelong study of consistent ethical leadership appears to have failed him at the moment America most needed it.

For some reason as I was watching the interview with Comey, who wanted more than anything else to serve the agency and leave it and the country stronger and better off than he found it, I could not help but think of Howell Raines, the former editor of the New York Times who once said the same thing about the paper in an interview on Public Television with Charlie Rose. For reasons perhaps beyond his control, he also had to depart the room early and did not leave the institution better off than he found it.

Raines was gone from the paper by 2004-2005, so he was not there to preside over the decision made by his successor Bill Keller to withhold for a full year a major investigative story on the NSA and AT&T spying domestically on American citizens for similar reasons Comey cited for doing what he did. The paper did not want to have an impact on the 2004 election.

Why not? Did the American people not deserve to know that the Bush administration was spying on them in violation of national law and policy? Would the nation not have been better off with a Democrat, John Kerry, in the White House than for Bush to win a second term and lead the nation into the Great Recession of 2007-2008?

For all her faults, chief among them her hawkishness to appear tough to counter the Republican war mongers, Hillary Clinton would have been a decent president at least. She had campaigned basically to continue President Barack Obama’s work and legacy. Donald Trump is a freaking disaster on every front.

I am a bit puzzled where and when these principles surfaced anyway. Perhaps readers can help me understand this in the comments.

I don’t ever recall in any journalism textbook, class or newsroom anyone saying we should not have an impact on an election with our work. In fact in my experience, newspaper editors and publishers have often tried to have an impact on elections, court cases and all kinds of things, often for economic purposes, as I write about in my memoir.

Does anyone think the FBI under former long-time director J. Edgar Hoover did not try to have an impact on elections or anything else in American life? Did the agency not investigate Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights struggle to try to get him to stop leading protests and fighting for the rights of African Americans?

Even after Watergate, when Comey says the agency was set upon its independent course, the agency has been used by Republican and Democratic presidents to undermine justice in all kinds of ways over the decades. If you don’t believe me, check out David Burnham’s significant book Secret Deals, Political Fixes and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice.

I am quoted by name in the book and my work is cited for showing that the Reagan Justice Department investigated the black mayor of Birmingham for many years while ignoring far worse crimes by Guy Hunt, a federal employee who went on to become the first Republican governor of Alabama in 100 years since federal Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Was Comey just sleeping like Rapunzel during the Bush years, when the entire federal judicial system was used for political purposes? Nowhere was that the case more than Alabama, where former governor Don Siegelman was tried and convicted for alleged bribery and corruption for appointing a businessman to a hospital board he had already served on for Republican governors, in exchange for a contribution to pay off the debt on an education lottery campaign.

Is this the FBI and Justice Department Comey is talking about not wanting to have an impact on an election? I mean the only reason Siegelman was investigated was to prevent him from beating Bob Riley for reelection in 2006.

Let the Chips Fall Where They May

Now let me end with an anecdote from my experience when I learned it is a mistake to withhold news to try to force or prevent an outcome.

It must have been 1989. I received a tip that a giant old oak tree in Baldwin County, Alabama, was at risk from a crazy old lady who owned the property where it was located. People in Mobile and Baldwin County today may know about the giant live oak that had to be cut down a few years back along Highway 90 by Weeks Bay. I was about ready to write and publish a story about it back then, but a member of the Baldwin County Commission begged me to hold off.

The county was in the process of trying to use eminent domain to condemn the property and turn it into a park. I agreed to hold the story. But before the legal paperwork could be filed, the woman hired a yard man to girdle the tree with a chain saw. The county intervened and hired a tree doctor to try to save the tree, but it died anyway. It was the largest, oldest tree in the county and one of the biggest and oldest in the state.

I can’t help but think if I had run the story and the photos I took of it back then, the publicity itself might have saved the tree. We will never know. But ever since then, I have always erred on the side of running the story, not holding off. I think the Times was wrong to hold the domestic spying story.

In the case of Comey and the Clinton email investigation, if there was nothing to merit a prosecution in the first instance after a year long investigation, why was there any reason to think reopening the investigation would result in a different conclusion? Clearly there was too much of a focus by the mainstream media on Clinton’s emails during the campaign. There was no there, there. Remember, even Bernie Sanders said he didn’t want to hear anymore about Clinton’s emails. It was much ado about nothing and should not have been an issue that may have changed the outcome of the election.

Clearly Trump is an idiot for firing Comey. He would have been better with Comey in charge of the investigation than having a special prosecutor like Robert Muller probing his every move. I mean Comey even said in the interview he was not in favor of Congress impeaching Trump. He is clearly in the camp of those who just want Trump to lose reelection in 2020.

They key question Stephanopoulos failed to ask? “Should Trump be indicted and arrested for his crimes now, or do we have to wait for Congress to impeach after the Democrats take over both houses in November 2018?”

I have already written my position on that question. I say Trump should be indicted, arrested and frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs and chains. I know there are lots of people, including a lot of Democrats, who disagree with me about this. It has never been done before. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the legality of it. But there is precedent for the legal position that even the president is “not above the law.” If ever there was a time to test that theory, this is it.