FBI Director Jim Comey was reportedly caught off guard when he was fired by President Donald John Trump. The reports are that when he first heard about it, he thought it was a joke.
If that is true then it is simply more proof that he was unfit for the job, or perhaps that he has a tin ear as far as politics is concerned, despite occupying a highly political job.
It appeared that during the presidential campaign Comey was trying to ensure that, whoever won the race, he would be fired.
Hillary Clinton was furious at him for going over the findings of the FBI investigation in public, a rare if not unprecedented action, and then for announcing he was reopening the investigation when more classified documents were found on the laptop of Huma Abedin’s husband, Anthony Weiner.
The mainstream media seem to be making a big deal about how the emails got on Weiner’s laptop. What difference does it make? The classified State Department emails shouldn’t have been anywhere other than on a secure device.
Comey made Hillary Clinton mad by revealing so much information about her home brew email server and he made Trump mad by not indicting Hillary Clinton for repeated violations of the laws concerning classified information.
What is surprising is not that Comey was fired but that he lasted over 100 days with Trump as his boss.
If there was any doubt about what Trump thought of Comey, it was resolved by the way Trump fired Comey.
The most considerate way to fire a person is face to face. The second is with a telephone call. This isn’t as personal but at least the person being fired hears it directly from their boss.
A private email is down the list somewhere, as is a letter, and in particular a hand delivered letter to someone’s office when you know they aren’t in the office.
I don’t find it at all odd that Comey was fired for the way he handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Comey did what so many government employees do – he decided unilaterally to do someone else’s job without even telling them.
At the end of the investigation it is not the job of the FBI to decide whether or not someone is prosecuted. It is the job of the FBI to turn the material over to the attorney general’s office and let the prosecuting attorneys decide whether the results of the investigation rise to the level of a prosecutable offense.
Comey decided on his own to be FBI director and attorney general because he decided that the attorney general was not only too compromised by her meeting with Bill Clinton to handle the case herself, but was too compromised for her to appoint someone else in the office to do so. He made all of these decisions on his own as if he were the only person in the government with the integrity to handle the case properly. There is good reason to think that he believed that to be the case.
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The person who should be worried about the firing of Comey is Hillary Clinton. There is nothing to stop Attorney General Jeff Sessions from deciding to have his prosecutors take another look at the evidence compiled by the FBI about the way Hillary Clinton handled classified information when she was secretary of state.
At the time that Comey announced no charges would be brought against Hillary Clinton, or the people who worked closely with her at the State Department, the word was that the rank-and-file FBI agents who investigated Hillary Clinton were incensed that somehow Comey – acting as prosecutor, judge and jury – had found Hillary Clinton not guilty of committing any crimes.
It would be startling if Sessions or the people he has hired to work for him came up with the same conclusion.
Trump knows that if Hillary Clinton is prosecuted, the people who voted for him will jump up and down and cheer. Trump also knows that the mainstream media will go absolutely nuts and accuse of him of committing crimes worse than ISIS.
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Here’s a question some big news organization like The New York Times should get a couple of reporters to work on: How much has Bill Clinton made in speaking fees since his wife is no longer secretary of state or the president-in-waiting?
Right after Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president, Bill Clinton picked up a quick $2.7 million in speaking fees. Of course, while his wife was secretary of state, Bill Clinton received as much as $750,000 for a speech from a foreign company. If that isn’t influence peddling, what is? They didn’t write the check to the secretary of state, but the two are married, so they might as well have.
If foreign companies are not still willing to pay him $500,000 or so to speak, isn’t that evidence of influence peddling? Except everyone knows it was influence peddling. Bill Clinton was getting paid far more than a former US president who has been out of office for over 10 years should get paid. The most obvious reason a former president would receive two or three times as much money as he had been receiving before his wife was named secretary of state is because his wife was named secretary of state.
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Republicans call their party the Stupid Party for a reason, and the party is again earning its name by not getting rid of the archaic rules requiring 60 votes to pass bills in the Senate.
This is not your grandfather’s Senate, where a bunch of old men, some Democrats, some Republicans, sat around and discussed which was the best direction for the country.
Now it is a highly partisan charged atmosphere, not all senators are men, not all are old, and polite political discussion fled the place decades ago.
As long as Obama was in power it didn’t matter how many votes were needed to end debate, because Obama was going to veto whatever the Republicans in the Senate did. I think the Republicans kind of liked the idea that they couldn’t do anything because they couldn’t get 60 votes and couldn’t override a veto.
When the Democrats were in power they used the nuclear option when they wanted to get some judges appointed. They would have no doubt used it on more legislation but the Republicans controlled the House so there was no need.
So the Democrats did away with the arcane rules when it helped them, but didn’t bother when it wouldn’t. There is absolutely no reason to even consider that if the tables were turned the Democrats would not have already done away with the 60-vote rule and gone to a simple majority for everything.
If the Republicans keep playing this game they are going to look really dumb if, in 2020, the Democrats take control of the government and go to a simple majority for everything the first day in session.
It’s like the argument for bipartisanship. When the Democrats are in the minority, they and their cohorts, the mainstream media, always talk about bipartisan bills like they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. But Obamacare and the stimulus bill both passed without a single Republican vote.
When the Democrats have a majority, the mainstream media forget all about the need for bipartisanship in Congress.
The Republicans need to govern. The voters elected them to govern and they need to get on the stick, ignore the mainstream media, which is simply a liberal branch of the Democratic Party, and do whatever it takes to pass the legislation they need to pass.
If they don’t start soon, the Democrats are going to rightly make the argument in the next election that the Republicans talk a lot but don’t do anything.
Trump is the only one in Washington who appears to be working. He appointed a whole slate of judges who now have to be confirmed by the Senate, and hopefully they will be confirmed quickly. Former President Barack Obama moved the federal judiciary so far left it is hardly recognizable as a judiciary, and it is taking over the legislative branch of government. The liberal judges aren’t satisfied with simply making decisions on laws, they are writing laws.
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Liberals say that health insurance is a basic human right.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – I get those, but health insurance, doesn’t seem to fit.
I grew up in a middle-class family and we didn’t have health insurance. We didn’t know it was an inalienable right. We got our medical care through an archaic system where, when his children went to the doctor, my father wrote that doctor a check. Today nobody wants to revert to a backward system like that, but I have to admit it seemed to work better than what we have now. Doctors and nurses spent their time treating patients rather than filling out forms. It may sound crazy, but that’s the way things were done before government got involved in health care.
I know that it is wrong to think this and I’m hoping the thought police don’t catch me, but I really do believe we were better off before the government took over health care. Face it, whether we have Obamacare, Trumpcare, Ryancare or Pelosicare, the government is running the healthcare business. It’s not likely we’ll have Pelosicare, but if we did you can bet that free Botox would be at the top of the list.
If health insurance is a basic human right, it does make me wonder if car insurance, homeowners insurance and life insurance are also rights. They might be, but I’m fairly certain that trip insurance is not. But then again, what do I know.
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It appears that we had an FBI director who didn’t think it was a crime to send emails containing classified information on an unsecure server, or to send them on an unsecure system to be stored on someone’s unsecured computer if there was no malicious intent.
If this is determined to be the law, then the people who are in prison for having classified information in an unsecure location should be released.
Certainly the conviction of General David Petraeus should be expunged from his record – he was convicted of copying classified information into a journal that was kept in an unlocked drawer at his home. It seems that according to former FBI Director Comey’s interpretation of the law, Petraeus could have taken the pages out of his journal and posted them on a bulletin board outside his building and – as long as his heart was pure – no crime would have been committed.
Comey, when testifying before a congressional committee, talked about what a difficult position he was in, making decisions on the activities of Hillary Clinton and her body woman Abedin. No doubt it was difficult to decide that, despite the way the laws on classified materials have been enforced in the past, they should not be prosecuted.
By the way, a big deal has been made about whether the information was marked classified or not. In the past that hasn’t mattered. In the case of the sailor who was sent to prison for having photos of a classified area of a nuclear submarine on his cell phone, the courts did not find that no crime was committed because the photos weren’t marked classified. It was enough that he knew the area was classified and the photos were on an unsecure phone. There was also no proof that he sent the photos to anyone or that he intended to send them to anyone.