Director Comey and A Lie Is A Lie: Wrestling With One’s Conscience

() grey wolfI finally figured out what is going on. I should have known it from my experience watching the federal prosecutors in Boston who live by the motto which was spoken by their fearless leader: “Stealing is Stealing.” I doesn’t matter how much is stolen or the intent behind the person doing the stealing. Embezzling a billion dollars is the same as pinching a computer from a federal office.

That’s the black and white way. It allows one to do their job without any thought or regret. Decisions are easy then. That mindset comes down to us from the Common Law where in England the stealing a loaf of bread was punished in the same way as stealing of a life. The culprit would be hanged.

The best thing about hangings in Merrie Ole England was that they were self-perpetuating. When the crowd assembled to watch the king’s justice meted out the pickpockets showed up. One or two would be arrested. The penalty for pick pocketing was hanging.

Comey is from the stealing is stealing school. I know that because the members of that school also believe lying is lying except when you are lying as a witness on behalf of them. In that latter instance you are advancing justice by helping them convict the person they decided was a bad person. Outside of that if you lie to them you are obstructing them in their pursuit of justice. It is a wonderful thing to catch a person in a lie because you can charge for the lie and double up by adding a charge of obstruction of justice.

How do I know Comey believes lying is lying? He told us that. Remember Martha Stewart. He put her in jail for lying. No, it was not for insider trading since he could not prove that case but during his investigation she lied about knowing that a certain person had dumped all his stocks in a specific company. When she heard from that person’s broker who was also her broker that he did that she turned around and dumped hers.

Some people saw little sense in prosecutor Martha. What was going to be accomplished by doing it? Why send her to prison?

Comey was asked to explain. He said:

“If it was Jane Doe she would have been prosecuted. [T]here were 2,000 cases by the Justice Department that year for providing false statements during an investigation. I thought of my hesitation about the case due to someone being rich and famous, and how it shouldn’t be that way. I decided we had to do it.”

I suggest Comey was really thinking: “Martha is rich and famous. Even though the evidence really does not warrant it, I better do it. If I don’t prosecute I may be criticized.”

To my way of thinking what Comey did was prosecute her precisely because she was “rich and famous.” That there were 2,000 cases prosecuted for lying does not mean that every case in which a witness may have lied was prosecuted. Perhaps there were 10,000 cases where people made false statements and did not get prosecuted. The prosecutor may have weighed the false statement against other factors and elected not to do it.

From all I can surmise Comey did consider Hillary’s status when the email matter first came up as he did with Martha Stewart. In Martha’s case he called a grand jury; in Hillary’s he didn’t. Early on he had to have decided to give Hillary a break. He would do that in July. He knew everyone around him knew he gave her a pass. That, of course, he had every right to do as he well knew.

However in doing that, to quote from an old Kingston Trio song about the Unfortunate Miss Bailey: “His wicked conscience smitted him. He lost his stomach daily. He took to drinking ratafia and tho’t upon Miss Bailey Hillary

Director Comey regretted his clearing Clinton. His conscience bothered him greatly. He sought a way out. The letter was his way to calm his conscience.

 

18 Comments

  1. How could the FBI have missed THESE? Judicial Watch remains our last, best hope!

    Clinton-Abedin Email Exchanges of Classified Information on Unsecure Server

    OCTOBER 31, 2016
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    Emails Also Reveal Special Favor for Top Clinton Foundation Donor, Distribution of Clinton State Department Schedule to Foundation Staff

    (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released 323 pages of new Department of State documents, including previously unreleased email exchanges in which Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin sent classified information over Clinton’s clintonemail.com unsecure email system. According to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions cited in the documents obtained by Judicial Watch, three of the Clinton-Abedin email exchanges contained material “classified to protect national security.”

    Also included in the newly obtained documents is an additional instance of the State Department doing special favors for a high-dollar Clinton Foundation donor. And the documents include instances of the distribution by State Department officials of Clinton’s government schedule to members of the Clinton Foundation staff.

    The documents contain emails not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date of such emails uncovered by Judicial Watch to 238 new Clinton emails (not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department). These records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department.

    The new records include three separate Clinton-Abedin email exchanges withheld in part from Judicial Watch under the State Department’s “B1” FOIA exemption, applying to “information that is classified to protect national security”:

  2. The plot does indeed thicken

    Here’s more on the McCabe angle for you Matt:

    http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/clinton-foundation-scandal-a-justice-dept-cover-up-exposed/

    “Early this year, four FBI field offices — New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark. — were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling,” the Journal reported.

    But when these investigators presented their findings to the Justice Department in February 2016, Justice refused to grant them the authority to use more aggressive investigative techniques, such as issuing subpoenas or conducting formal interviews.

    Then, on Aug. 12 — the day after the Daily Caller piece ran — a “very pissed off” senior Justice Department official called Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe after learning that FBI agents were nevertheless still pursuing the Clinton Foundation case.

    The Journal quotes FBI agents who said they were then told to “stand down” from the probe.

    The report also notes that U.S. attorneys refused to let FBI investigators look at devices turned over in the Clinton email scandal to see if they contained evidence of wrongdoing at the foundation. Justice had conveniently agreed to immunity and limited-use deals with Clinton’s lawyers.

  3. Good comments all around: the Old Bailey, Miss Bailey, Tom Dooley, “taking the soup” “rice Christians”, Harry Reid’s invocation of the Hatch Act, and the McCabe-Comey connection. The plot thickens.
    The same persons who hailed Comey’s “unimpeachable integrity” in July now stone him.

  4. Congressman Trey Gowdy

    In an interview Monday with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Gowdy said his reaction was “just how laughable that is” and criticized Reid for not writing such a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who held an impromptu meeting with former President Bill Clinton at an Arizona airport before the FBI announced its decision to not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton, and President Barack Obama, who he said “prejudged the outcome of the investigation.”

    “Senator Reid didn’t write a letter to either one of them about the Hatch Act,” he said. “I mean, President Obama is actively campaigning right now for a candidate for president, and that doesn’t violate the Hatch Act. So how Jim Comey supplementing his record before Congress violates the Hatch Act is just laughable.”

    http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/harry-reid-james-comey-letter-trey-gowdy-230525

  5. Comey: Two words.

    Methodist convert.

    Converts to anything most always become the most fanatical believers.

    The true believer knows that God has commanded them to follow the path outlined in the Gospels.

    • Henry:

      He “took the soup.” Do you know about “taking the soup?” During the Famine English Prod missionaries went to the West to preach. They were accomplished fellows who spoke fluent Irish. They offered soup to the starving Irish, if they would convert. It was hard to resist. The prod teachers could always out talk the parish prelates, but, the preachers had no reply when the priests would circulate in the crowds banging a large empty pot with a wooden spoon.

      • I don’t think that bit of derogatory folklore applies here. Souperism was not widespread but makes a good story like ‘rice Christians’ in a different time and place. The Quakers never asked for religious conversions when they fed the starving. Today there are 63 mosques in Ireland, so they can feed the starving next time.

        Today, the Irish would be more interested in what side your family took in 1922.

        • Dia duit,

          Half of my family is staunchly nationalist. My Sis married a guy from Arboe. In my school days, I supported the activities of Cathal Brugha IRC, and, represented the interests of the folks at Divis Flats. We’re taigs, if that’s what you’re asking. The other half of the family is vaguely aware that Ireland floats around in the Atlantic somewhere near England.

          slan

          • Henry:

            Do you believe it’s possible to be bi-religious?

            Your question intrigued me to extent that I wet out to the barn and fished a dusty volume out of the hay: “The Protestant Crusade in Ireland 1800-70” by Desmond Brown.

            Generous Quakers, you say, well…let’s look.

          • Henry:

            Bowen also wrote, “Souperism: Myth, or, Reality?” Its all about the Prod missionaries’ use of bribery to obtain converts during the era of the great famine.

            Ultramontanism, hmm, that you?

          • Henry:

            wallahi! St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274 ce) acquired many of the ideas articulated in the Quaestiones Disputatae De Anima from Ibn Rusd, also known as Averroes,(d.1198 ce) by way of Spain. What goes around, comes around:

            Among the tenets of so-called Latin Averroism was the view, first held by Averroes, that the move from perceptive acts to intellection is not one from a lower to a higher set of capacities or faculties of the human soul. Aristotle contrasts intellection with perception, and argues that the former does not employ a sense organ because it displays none of the characteristics of perception which does employ an organ. Thus insofar as sensation can be said to be in some respects material and in others immaterial, intellection is said to be completely immaterial. But on the Latin-Averroistic view, Aristotle is not thus referring to another capacity of the human soul, the intellect, but, rather, referring to a separate entity thanks to whose action human beings engage in what we call thinking. But the cause of this, the agent intellect, is not a faculty of the soul. (Aristotle had distinguished at least two intellects, a possible and an agent.) The proof for incorruptibility which results from an activity that does not employ a corporeal organ is therefore a statement about the incorruptibility of this separate entity, not a basis for arguing that each human soul is incorruptible because it has the capacity to perform incorporeal activities. The Latin-Averroists consequently denied that Aristotle taught personal immortality.
            (Quaestiones Disputatae De Anima 2)
            Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

            Henry, what’ your opinion of Marcel Lefebvre?

        • Henry:
          –“Today there are 63 mosques in Ireland, so they can feed the starving next time.”
          Do you feel the same way about synagogues in Ireland? I wouldn’t be surprised, if you do.

          • “… transcending the entire universe there exists a cause which brought the universe into being ex nihilo … our whole universe was caused to exist by something beyond it and greater than it. For it is no secret that one of the most important conceptions of what theists mean by ‘God’ is Creator of heaven and earth.”[5]
            Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

            According to Sartre, human consciousness creates, and, recreates, the universe, on into infinity. Consciousness creates form in what would, otherwise, be the indistinguishable plethora of being. Existence proceeds essence. (“Being and Nothingness).

            Thanks for getting religious Henry. We’ll have a fine discussion, you ol’ mackerel-snapper.

  6. Yet, as the saying goes, “justice delayed is justice denied”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_delayed_is_justice_denied

  7. One has to judge Comey’s conduct in relation to what happened with the McCabe affair. It seems the Clinton’s through McCauliffe bribed the lead investigator by giving $600G to his wife. Once that is disclosed Comey and those who promoted McCabe look vulnerable to the claim of participating in that bribery scheme. Maybe his recent missive is to distance himself from what appears to be a payoff. How best to avoid his indictment in that Virginia scandal. Do the deleted E-mails remind one of travelgate and filegate ( missing records)? Maybe the Clinton’s know of Dimento’s old formula. Records plus co operation equal conviction. Happy Halloween.

  8. “I finally figured out what is going on.” LOL.

    Could be some truth in it. Maybe not. It is like hanging out the laundry during a hurricane. Probably won’t dry.

  9. Hang Down Your Head, Jim Comey….