Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Comey’s Credibility

40 Comments

I’m just watching it disintegrate in this hearing.

He didn’t look into whether or not she lied under oath to Congress? He didn’t put her under oath for her “interview”? He didn’t record the “interview”? He didn’t participate? Really? And we’re supposed to take his result seriously?

[Update a couple minutes later]

(Former prosecutor) Trey Gowdy destroyed Comey’s legal argument:

Gowdy’s response: How do you know she didn’t intend to put classified information on her private server? Absent a defendant saying “I hereby intend to do act X,” the only way a prosecutor can ever prove intent is though circumstantial evidence. That’s the point of leading Comey through Clinton’s many lies. It’s not (just) a political exercise designed to embarrass the Democratic nominee, it’s evidence that she was trying to hide her intent in making one false statement after another suggesting mere incompetence. Even by Comey’s own higher standard of mens rea, there’s enough here to recommend charges, Gowdy’s saying. So why weren’t they recommended?

If Comey thinks that mens rea is a requirement (perhaps it should be, but it is not), then he should get a court to rule on it. He can’t unilaterally rewrite the law.

But of course, her intent was obvious. He’s shown himself to be as corrupt as the rest of the Beltway.

[Update a while later]

[Update a few minutes later]

Let’s make her president!

[Update a couple minutes later]

[Update a while later]

The hearing isn’t over, but Ashe Schow has eleven take aways so far.

This is just stunning. I’ve lost all confidence in the FBI.

[Update a while later]

Note to people who think she’s off the hook:

But I’m sure Comey will say she didn’t have any intent to take those bribes.

[Update later afternoon]

[Update a few minutes later]

There is plenty of precedent for prosecuting for gross negligence. And before someone says those are military cases, my response is “so”? Classified is classified.

40 thoughts on “Comey’s Credibility”

      1. Yet since they don’t make a transcript or record anything, they can’t prove she lied to an FBI agent. It’s just he said, she said.

        1. And yet they managed to with Martha Stewart. They at least took effing notes there, but I guess they didn’t here, or they classified them. Which shatters the irony meter.

      2. She lied many times to many different groups of people and yet some people still believe what she says, astounding!

  4. I have more confidence in Austria’s government right now than the US. At least its legal system has a limit to government corruption.

  5. I hven’t been following this story, but this caught my eye:

    He didn’t put her under oath for her “interview”?

    Is it standard for law enforcement in the US to put people under oath when they’re being interviewed?
    I’ve never heard of such a procedure.

    1. I don’t know what the standard procedure is, but the last person I would interview in a criminal investigation without putting her under oath would be Hillary Clinton.

    2. It is a crime to lie to a federal official. This is what Scooter Libby was prosecuted and found guilty on one count of making false statements to the FBI. Oath probably isn’t the right term, but criminal subjects are read their Miranda Rights.

      More alarming than the lack of oath, they didn’t record the interview. That is a standard procedure during interviews held at investigative facilities. Why? To capture any and all testimony that could be held against someone in a court of law. And here is the thing, this was made official FBI policy in all cases. Who announced this policy? Eric Holder as AG and it went into effect July 11, 2014.

      1. Leland,

        That’s also what got Martha Stewart time in Club Fed. She lied to a federal officer about something that wasn’t even a crime, and they changed her with perjury. Of course she wasn’t the Democratic Party nominee for president, so of course she went to jail.

  6. Yeah that was stupid. I was willing to give Comey the benefit of the doubt on this one, due to probable political pressure and the practically of indicting a Democrat presidential candidate. But to not even put her under oath or record the interview is just in your face “she’s too big to fail”. Nothing says “the fix was in” louder than that.

    1. I was thinking Comey might have been fairly clever, but Rand is right about his credibility. Today was a bad day for the FBI and its docile leader.

  7. A fact: lying to the FBI is a crime.

    Another fact: they can’t prosecute without evidence.

    Third fact: this is why the FBI ALWAYS records formal interviews – so they can prosecute if the interviewee lies.

    That this interview was not recorded is literally unprecedented.

  8. This hearing is pretty much sufficient evidence that the FBI needs to be investigated.

    Hint: It isn’t merely gross negligence there either.

  9. A couple key comments from Comey’s testimony:

    There was a statute passed in 1917 that on its face makes it a crime, a felony for someone to engage in gross negligence. So that would appear to say, well, maybe in that circumstance you don’t need to prove they were doing something unlawful, maybe it’s enough to prove they were really, really careless beyond a reasonable doubt. At the time Congress passed that statute in 1917, there was a lot of concern in the House and Senate about whether that was going to violate the American tradition of requiring that before you go and lock somebody up, you proved they knew they were doing something wrong. So there was a lot of concern about it.

    “The statute was passed. As best I can tell, the Department of Justice has used it once in the 99 years since reflecting that same concern. I know from 30 years with the Department of Justice, they have grave concerns about whether it’s appropriate to prosecute somebody for gross negligence, which is why they’ve done it once that I know of in a case involving espionage.

    “When I look at the facts we gather here, as I said, I see evidence of great carelessness, but I do not see evidence that is sufficient to establish that Secretary Clinton or those with whom she was corresponding, both talked about classified information on e-mail and knew when they did it, they were doing something that was against the law. So given that assessment of the facts, my understanding of the law, my conclusion was and remains, no reasonable prosecutor would bring this case. No reasonable prosecutor would bring the second case in 100 years focused on gross negligence. I know that’s been a source of some confusion for folks, that’s just the way it is. I know the Department of Justice, I know no reasonable prosecutor would bring the case. I know a lot of my former friends are out there saying, they would. I wonder where they were in the last 40 years because I’d like to see the cases they brought on gross negligence. Nobody would. Nobody did.

    And:

    I understand why people are confused by the whole discussion. I get that. But you know what would be a double standard? If she were prosecuted for gross negligence.

    1. That is utter BS. Comey is full of it.

      People are often charged with manslaughter for leaving kids in hot cars, even if they didn’t “intend” for them to die. That is an example of being prosecuted for gross negligence. The fact that it can be a crime is why they came up with the legal phrase.

      1. It’s true that you can be convicted of a variety of things without having intended them to happen. But mishandling classified documents is apparently not one of those things — Comey claims that there’s only been one case even filed in the last century. I’d love to know the specifics, and how it turned out.

        1. But mishandling classified documents is apparently not one of those things

          It is one of those things. It’s black-letter law. If Comey wants to rewrite the law, he needs to run for Congress.

          1. Black-letter law? So was marriage being between one man and one woman. So were the sodomy laws. The laws against pedophilia, zoophilia, and necrophilia are “black-letter laws” right now, but give the Kenyan and his fellow-travelers time.

            What part of “fundamental transformation” did you not understand?

          1. McCarthy seems to be admitting that there’s no precedent for a civilian being charged the way he wants Clinton charged. Comey reports that every single one of the 15-20 FBI investigators who worked the case were opposed to filing charges. To go ahead and file charges anyway would have been subjecting Clinton to an entirely novel standard that has never been applied before.

          3. To the extent serving in the military incurs special responsibilities; is it your claim, Jim, that serving as Secretary of State is no different than being a plumber or brick layer? I understand that Hillary has no major accomplishments, are you here to discredit the importance of Secretary of State too?

        3. FWIW, the one case of the DOJ filing an indictment for gross negligence in handling of classified documents was the 2003 case of FBI counterintelligence agent James J. Smith. He had conducted an almost 20 year clandestine affair with a source who was also a Chinese intelligence agent. He left unsecured classified documents where she could access them, and she was able to deliver copies to Chinese intelligence. Smith was charged with fraud and lying to investigators as well as the gross negligence count. He pled guilty to one charge of filing false reports to conceal his affair, and got no jail time.

          The contrast with the Clinton case is that Smith knew he was breaking the law in a number of different ways, and the disclosure of classified materials was a direct byproduct of those intentional illegal acts. There’s no evidence that Clinton ever did anything she knew at the time to be illegal.

          1. There’s no evidence that Clinton ever did anything she knew at the time to be illegal.

            a) Ignorance of the law is no excuse for the little people, why should it be for her?

            b) She has no excuse to be ignorant of the law, unless she was grossly negligent in attending required security briefings.

    2. That Hillary’s crimes were unprecedented doesn’t excuse her, it actually makes her actions worse.

      Comey changed the law. In his testimony he claimed there had to be evil intent. Not just intent, or intent to break a specific law(s), but evil intent.

      Comey kept moving the goalposts, it’s a fraud.

      1. That Hillary’s crimes were unprecedented doesn’t excuse her, it actually makes her actions worse.

        Her “crimes” are anything but unprecedented. Carelessness has resulted in the disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons time and time again. But the DOJ has never criminally charged anyone for doing only that; that’s what would be unprecedented.

        We know that the State Department’s internal email was penetrated by foreign hackers, and we know that Condoleezza Rice’s aides sent classified information through that system. If Clinton is guilty of a crime, they are as well, and they have lots of company.

        In his testimony he claimed there had to be evil intent.

        No, just intent to break the law.

  10. As for not recording her, here’s my theory. People get in trouble when the FBI thinks the target has done something possibly illegal, and the target lies to investigators about it. Investigators thought that Libby and Rove had told journalists about Plame, asked them about it, and they lied. They thought Petraeus had shown Broadwell classified documents, they asked him about it, and he lied. They thought Martha Stewart had traded on insider information, they asked her, and she lied.

    At that point the target is obstructing their investigation, and they hate that. So even if there isn’t evidence to indict on the original charge, they’re motivated to punish the target for the obstruction.

    The Rove case is interesting. They had him dead to rights for lying to a grand jury. But they let him return to the grand jury and correct his testimony, and he was let off the hook, because he’d stopped obstructing the investigation. Libby, by contrast, stuck with his lies until they got him convicted.

    My guess is that the FBI investigators didn’t go into their interview of Hillary Clinton thinking that she’d intentionally broken the rules on handling classified data. They’d already concluded that her actions could be completely explained as carelessness. So she was never in a position to obstruct their investigation by lying to them, and there was no point in recording her interview.

      1. It’s completely possible for a serious investigation to not find what you’d hoped it would find. The goal of the investigation wasn’t to get Clinton, it was to find out whether she’d broken the law in a way that is typically prosecuted. She hadn’t.

        1. It’s completely possible for a serious investigation to not find what you’d hoped it would find.

          Of course it is, but that has nothing to do with what happened here.

        2. They’d already concluded

          According to your theory, they didn’t do an investigation.

          the FBI investigators didn’t go into their interview of Hillary Clinton thinking that she’d intentionally broken the rules

          The actions she, and her staff, took showed intent. The actions could not have happened without intent. But Comey changed the law to “evil intent”.

    2. As for not recording her, here’s my theory.

      Who asked you? The FBI decided to not follow a policy implemented by this Administration just 2 years ago. Your theory only continues the notion that Hillary was treated like the 1% elite and not like our military men and women who hold clearances like hers.

      Investigators thought that Libby and Rove had told journalists about Plame, asked them about it, and they lied.

      And this isn’t even true. The Investigators knew who had told journalists about Plame, because he admitted it during the Investigation. Quote: “Mr Armitage told the New York Times he had wanted to disclose his role earlier, but had been asked not to by the prosecutor investigating the leak, Patrick Fitzgerald.”

      You really are FOS, Jim.

      1. The Investigators knew who had told journalists about Plame

        They knew about Armitage, but they also knew that there was at least one other source. When the FBI questioned two of the possible sources, Libby and Rove, they lied. And the FBI hates being lied to when they’re in the process of figuring out what happened.

        1. they also knew that there was at least one other source.

          BS. Daily Kos believes there were more leakers, but 2 things; it is a belief and there wasn’t one.

          the FBI hates being lied to

          Damn Jim, you think we like being lied to? How about Congress? The American people. Hillary lied to the American people on numerous occasions. You lie to us daily. For some reason, progressives seem to think lying is fine, so long as it is not done against the government.

    3. Jim, regarding the Libby case, what was the precedent for that, exactly? The investigation had already established, early on, that there was no crime committed in the Palme leak, because she wasn’t a covert agent. (no one ever charged the actual leaker, Armatage, with anything, for this very reason)

      However, a special prosecutor, Fitzgerald, was appointed, and proceeded with the investigation, looking for things he could indict for. He was supposed to be supervised by the AG, or in this case, the acting AG because the actual one had recused himself.

      And for a fun coincidence of the day, what’s the name of the assistant AG who appointed Fitzgerald while already knowing that no crime had been committed? Jim Comey.

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