COMEY — The First Domino
COMEY — The First Domino
The biggest political news from the US today is the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, for essentially lying. We all tell lies from time to time or even frequently, but some lies are far more serious than others. Telling your wife you like her new hairstyle when you think it’s yuk isn’t the same as lying under oath in a criminal trial, a civil trial, or a political hearing be it in Congress, the Senate or elsewhere.
Comey didn’t simply lie, as the brilliant America cartoonist A.F. Branco pointed out in the double take below, he was one of many people – inside and outside of the FBI who peddled the Russian collusion garbage and the Steele dossier.
Did Russia interfere in the 2016 American general election? Of course it did, but let’s get real, election interference happens all the time and many countries do it. China also interfered in the US election, so did Israel, so did the UK in a sense because Christopher Steele is a former British MI6 agent, although he was clearly acting on behalf of Hillary Clinton rather than the British Government.
America also interferes in foreign elections, at times this interference has gone much further than simple election meddling, the invasion of Iraq on the spurious weapons of mass destruction pretext is just one example.
What is clear though is that Russia did not interfere in order to promote Donald Trump, and no member of the Trump family colluded with any Russian, whatever is meant by that nebulous word, although bad actors did everything in their power to promote this lie.
The worst interference, if it can be called that, came from the Internet Research Agency, a now defunct Russian outfit which can best be described as a troll farm. In February 2018, a grand jury indicted 13 Russian nationals and 3 companies for election interference. The other two companies were Concord Catering and Concord Management.
Robert Mueller and his team brought these charges to give credence to the Trump/Russia collusion claims knowing, or believing, none of the individuals concerned would surrender to the American authorities. Embarrassingly, Concord Management hired two American lawyers to defend the case, which meant what? That the company was entitled to discovery of the evidence against it. As no such credible evidence existed, the Mueller team quietly dropped the case.
There were also other revelations, such as the wilful misleading of the FISA Court in order to spy on the Trump campaign and later the Trump White House. Trump had already fired Comey, in May 2017, replacing him with Christopher Wray (who was arguably even worse). In the interim, Andrew McCabe stepped in as Acting Director; he too is a proven liar and may well be the next person to be indicted.
Undeterred by any of this, Comey published his autobiography which Fox News legal pundit Gregg Jarrett likened to a Harlequin Romance in which the protagonist is in love with himself.
Who else is in legal jeopardy apart from Comey and McCabe? Letitia James for sure; although not part of the Russia collusion cabal, her behaviour was outrageous. In the UK and most other countries, a state prosecutor who sounded off the way she did about Trump would have been removed from office. When she is indicted, it will be for criminal charges related to property fraud, similar to the contrived civil case she brought against Trump in an attempt to bankrupt him.
Michael Cohen testified at that trial, and on the witness stand admitted stealing money from Trump. If he isn’t indicted, it will only be because Trump considers him too small a fish.
Some people have suggested the trail of corruption leads all the way up to Barack Obama, and that the Biden Administration was his third term. An objective appraisal of the facts refutes this though, the big fish, the Queen of Mean, is Hillary Clinton. She may be the last person indicted, but there are plenty more including Susan Rice and Adam Schiff. We will have to wait for further developments, but we may not have to wait long.