“Congress must treat Comey as a hostile witness …”
Does the nation’s top investigator need to be investigated?
The apparently orchestrated releases of groping accusations against Donald Trump are hogging the headlines now and may overshadow even more serious questions about the integrity of FBI boss James Comey. Some in Congress are asking just how truthful and forthcoming Comey really was he went before a House committee to explain his decision to let Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton skate on her long-running email scandal.
And they’re questions that strike to the heart of the public’s trust in the nation’s primary law enforcement agency.
In a column published by the New York Post this week, veteran journalist and author Paul Sperry notes that, in his testimony to Congress in July, Comey declared that “I think transparency matters tremendously.”
But it turned out it didn’t seem to matter much at all.
For instance, in the four-and-a-half hours Comey spent in front of the House Oversight Committee in July, the FBI director never saw fit to mention the extraordinary immunity deals his agency had made with key figures in the email investigation — figures who could have faced prosecution.
Such deals included preventing FBI investigators from reviewing emails between Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and Paul Combetta, the man who was the administrator for Clinton’s off-the-books, unsecured email server.
It was also discovered — after Comey’s Capitol Hill appearance — that the FBI destroyed computers belonging to certain of those Clinton aides and cronies, meaning potential evidence in a possible prosecution was lost forever.
According to a letter sent last week by the leaders of Oversight Committee to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the agreements between investigators and interviewees included restrictions on FBI agents review of evidence and potential evidence. Those restrictions, the lawmakers charged, “raise serious questions about why DOJ would consent to such substantial limitations on the scope of its investigation, and how Director Comey’s statements on the scope of the investigation comport with the reality of what the FBI was permitted to investigate.”
Raising questions about how an individual’s statements “comport with reality” is a polite way of suggesting those statements were lies. And when lies are spoken under oath, by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation no less, it just might be called “perjury.”
The mainstream media is hell-bent on destroying the Trump candidacy with a campaign of accusations – some of them literally decades old – about inappropriate sexual advances on women, but they’re ignoring the serious possibility that the country’s biggest agencies entrusted with investigating potential federal crimes and enforcing the laws of the United States have been corrupted for political purposes.
To some FBI insiders, unfortunately, that corruption is more than a possibility, it’s a fact. As a Fox News report Wednesday showed, Comey’s decision to clear Clinton was greeted with disgust by the agents and FBI specialists who actually worked on the Clinton investigation.
“It is safe to say the vast majority felt she should be prosecuted,” the FBI source told Fox.
Well, it’s safe to say that members of Congress who were apparently stonewalled by the man who oversaw that investigation — the FBI chief who said transparency was so important — should be furious.
And since those members of Congress represent the actual people in the American system of government, the American people should be furious, too.
But the airwaves, print media and online newsfeeds are filled with the Republican candidate’s responses to suddenly ubiquitous allegations about behavior that allegedly took place as many as 35 years ago?
This is a serious point:
When it was happening in the Nixon White House, the largest news organizations in the country went to war with the administration. In the Obama years – and anticipating a Clinton restoration – those same news outlets are falling all over themselves to attack the challenger, and protect the cozy, corrupt regime in Washington.
Sperry’s column concludes on a grim note:
“Congress must treat Comey as a hostile witness and investigate the investigator.”
Fair enough. The American people should treat the mainstream media the same way.
Source: Western Journalism
