More On Comey And His Substack

It turns out that James Comey's strange video on Taylor Swift is just the tip of an iceberg. Julie Kelly has looked at all his Substack posts. These began in May.

Clad in business attire and wearing some sort of white make up to conceal a persistent puffy-eye problem, Comey gives scripted performances in a cloying uptalk cadence to answer his critics in a carefree way to sound like he isn’t worried about potential legal consequences for what he did. He talks a lot about “love” and “laughter” and finding “peace” in the second era of Trump—quickly leading the viewer to believe Comey actually has very little love, laughter, or peace in his life. (A well-earned miserable existence if that’s indeed the case.)

One big question is how he has the time to do this stuff -- making videos is actually time-consuming work. Keep in mind that he started as an associate at a white-shoe law firm and went on to climb the ranks as an associate US Attorney, a US Attorney, Deputy Attorney General, and then, following some high-level corporate jobs, FBI Director. But Trump fired him at age 56, and since then, it really looks like he's been strolling the beach. No prestigious law firms, and apparently no corporate boards, have picked him up since his firing. Why not?

Getting fired by Trump, Comey insists, was the best thing that happened to him because now he can do yoga and play with chalk (and shells apparently) and “love deeply.” This segment alone should prompt an immediate investigation into every case Comey ever handled—or at least a psych evaluation.

. . . Democrats, despite a brief rendezvous with him during the first Trump term, still blame Comey for Hillary Clinton’s loss. He appears to have few defenders in former fed circles including those recently fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi; his name rarely comes up.

. . . Despite his best attempts to appear humorous, fearless, and cool, Comey instead comes across as a deeply disturbed individual who has bought into his own visions of grandeur for so long that he doesn’t really know what he is.

All I can think is people who know him even a little better than the general public does have also decided he's a deeply disturbed individual. But what did Barack Obama see in him? I can imagine that his resume as a Bush Republican would make Obama seem non-partisan and statesmanlike, but his handling of the Clinton e-mails is an indication that he was unstable and untrustworthy.

But add to it that in the January 6, 2017 meeting in Trump Tower, Comey seems to have thought it would be a good idea quietly to let Trump know he had the pee dossier. Think about this. Comey had to have a pretty good idea, if he didn't understand it outright, that the pee dossier was false. Trump would have understood completely that it was false -- as various people have said, Trump is a germophobe, he wouldn't get remotely close to anything like that.

I can only think Trump's immediate reaction had to have been along the line of, "What's with this guy? He's bonkers! How is he the FBI Director?" This, if nothing else, had to have set Trump to wondering what he'd gotten himself into and what he needed to do about it. But this also goes to what Obama saw in Comey: the guy was bonkers, completely unreliable, not even a truthtelling loose cannon, just untrustworthy at heart. How could Obama ever have found him useful?

But again, think of that January 6, 2017 Trump Tower meeting: Clapper and Brennan were trusting Comey to be the one guy who'd continue to execute their agenda within the government after Obama left office in two weeks. What were they missing? It makes me wonder if they were just as bonkers.

This brings up the question of why Trump actually fired Comey. According to Wikipedia,

The White House initially stated the firing was on the recommendation of United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, to both of whom Comey reported. Rosenstein had sent a memorandum to Sessions, forwarded to Trump, in which Rosenstein listed objections to Comey's conduct in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. . . . On May 10, Trump told reporters he had fired Comey because Comey "wasn't doing a good job".

By May 11, however, in a direct contradiction of the earlier statements by the White House, Vice President Mike Pence, and the contents of the dismissal letter itself, President Trump stated to Lester Holt in an NBC News interview that Comey's dismissal was in fact "my decision" and "I was going to fire [Comey] regardless of recommendation [by Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein]." Trump later said of the dismissal "when I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said 'You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.'" In the same televised interview, Trump labelled Comey "a showboat" and "grandstander".

On May 19, The New York Times published excerpts of an official White House document summarizing Trump's private meeting, the day after the firing, with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, in the Oval Office. Trump told Kislyak and Lavrov that he "just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job".

It's hard for me to avoid noting that after Trump fired Comey, nobody in the respectable legal, corporate, or academic world seems to have wanted to touch the guy, even though being a Trump victim should have made him attractive, even as just a figurehead. It looks to me as if Trump had real insight into Comey's case, which the elite movers and shakers seem to have recognized as well, however reluctant they were to admit it.

The question that keeps coming back for me is why Brennan, Clapper, and Obama missed this.