Byron York’s Daily Memo: New questions as Comey heads to Capitol Hill

NEW QUESTIONS AS COMEY HEADS TO CAPITOL HILL. Fresh from being the subject of a biopic that has been panned as “self-serious and melodramatic” and “a project nobody asked for,” fired FBI director James Comey will make an appearance in real life tomorrow before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There are a lot of new things, none of them good, to ask Comey about. There are, for example, new revelations about dissent inside the FBI over the handling — some would say railroading — of Trump adviser Michael Flynn. There are new revelations further undercutting — if that were possible — the phony allegations contained in the Steele dossier, which Comey’s FBI gave credence to at a critical time in the Trump-Russia investigation. Remember that Comey wanted to hire Steele, then he wanted to include the dossier’s findings in the Intelligence Community Assessment, and then he briefed President-elect Trump about the dossier’s bogus sex allegation. It all makes Comey look terrible.

But one particularly important thing to keep in mind during Comey’s appearance is a new book, by a not-unfriendly source — Washington Post reporter Devlin Barrett — that does enormous damage to Comey’s credibility. The book, October Surprise, describes Comey’s conduct in the critical month of October 2016, just before the presidential election, when the FBI was investigating both major party candidates.

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Basically, Barrett describes an FBI in which nobody can really trust what the director says. In one truly glaring example, the book recounts an important one-on-one conversation between Comey and his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Later, Comey and Lynch separately described the conversation to the Justice Department inspector general. And, as Barrett writes, “The two versions of the Lynch-Comey conversation are so starkly different, so fundamentally contradictory in meaning, specifics, and import, that it is hard to read them as descriptions of the same conversation.”

Lynch had corroboration for her version of the talk — she told colleagues about it shortly afterward, and one of them took contemporaneous notes. “No one has offered a similar corroboration of Comey’s account,” Barrett writes. And then, read this amazing paragraph on Comey’s trustworthiness:

The differing versions of the Comey-Lynch meeting are perhaps the starkest example of a disturbing feature of what was by then a broken relationship between the FBI and the Justice Department — at key moments involving the Clinton or Russia cases, Comey’s version of events is starkly at odds with accounts provided by Justice Department officials. “It’s not that there’s an outright lie in it, but the meaning gets all mangled,” opined one former senior Justice Department official. By mid-2016, Justice Department officials had come to suspect Comey viewed himself as the most moral, ethical actor in any room he was in. Much later, several of them came to believe his sense of moral superiority was driven in part by viewing even straightforward conversations with his superiors in a sinister light.

Hmmm…Moral superiority…mangled meanings…viewing conversations with his superiors in a sinister light. Might all those also apply to Comey’s accounts of one-on-one conversations with another superior, President Trump? Might Comey — whose secret memos describing those private talks with the president turbocharged the Russia investigation — have viewed what his superior said in a sinister light? Might he have mangled the meaning of what Trump said? Might his descriptions of Trump’s words have been infused with his own sense of moral superiority? And when Comey’s and Trump’s descriptions of the conversations were “fundamentally contradictory in meaning, specifics, and import,” might the fault have been Comey’s? It’s all entirely possible. Yet most media organizations treated Comey’s memos as the gospel truth. As such, they became a driver of the Trump-Russia investigation.

So perhaps senators could ask Comey about his credibility inside the FBI. Why were his versions of events often “starkly at odds with accounts provided by Justice Department officials”? Why did he view himself as the “most moral, ethical actor in any room he was in”? And why did he view “even straightforward conversations with his superiors in a sinister light?” Of course, Comey will deny it all. But the public needs to know about FBI officials’ serious doubts about their own director’s credibility.