Ex-FBI Director James Comey has placed himself in a bind with his foreboding talk of former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Conservative media have fixated on it. Consider what Comey’s self-professed “good friend,” Benjamin Wittes, said about a Fox News interview request he received.
In a series of tweets Sunday, he shared an excerpt of an email showing what the network wanted him to discuss.
“Reaching out to see if you might be available join us on the show this evening. We were hoping to expand on your thoughts from your recent piece, Behind James Comey’s ‘A Higher Loyalty’. We were specifically hoping to speak with you about Loretta Lynch with relation to the Clinton email investigation,” the email read.
“Note that of all of the things I have said about @Comey’s book, the one thing Fox wants to talk to me about concerns not Donald Trump, not the gross abuse of law enforcement taking place right now, not what I have called the crisis of our time, but … Loretta Lynch,” Wittes said about the email, adding, “That actually says a lot.”
Despite the heightened interest in Right-leaning media, including in the Washington Examiner, it has been the Left that has confronted and called Comey out on the duplicitous implications of his assertions, criticizing Lynch’s actions while also repeatedly claiming she did nothing improper in terms of the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized email server.
Face-to-face with Comey on Thursday, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow denounced his comments about Lynch in his book, in which he explained how the ex-attorney general asked him to call the investigation a “matter,” the controversial June 27, 2016 tarmac meeting Lynch had with Bill Clinton, and the mention of an unverified intelligence report suggesting that she had offered assurances to the Clinton campaign about the investigation.
Maddow complained that Comey, in both his memoir and accompanying book tour, cast “aspersions” on Lynch. “It seems that with Loretta Lynch you worried very much what misinformed people were going to say about her,” Maddow told Comey. “That there was no true reason to have concerns about Loretta Lynch’s integrity with that investigation.”
A somewhat hesitant Comey admitted, “Maybe in a slight sense.”
The negative perception perpetuated by media reports of the tarmac meeting was something that played a factor in Comey’s decision making. He told NPR that “a reasonable person” would have ignored the politically charged uproar, but that was not the course of action he took, claiming it “would have been a mistake.”
Furthermore, the unverified report Comey hints at in his book, which he remains simultaneously tight-lipped about while also teasing it “undoubtedly [would] have been used by political opponents to cast serious doubt on the attorney general’s independence in connection with the Clinton investigation,” would be more damaging to Comey than Lynch if it were to come out, said a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton.
Pointing to a May 2017 article from the Washington Post, Philippe Reines, who assisted Clinton in the State Department and her 2016 campaign, said the “TRUTH” is that it was a dubious Russian report citing a “supposed” email detailing how Lynch privately assured a senior Clinton campaign staffer that the email probe would not dive too deep.
“He omitted it [because] it’s embarrassing & makes him look like a fool. He was duped by a fake email,” Reines said.
Lynch, too, has not been silent. She pre-empted Comey’s book release with an interview on “NBC Nightly News.” In a statement last week, she denied ever coordinating with Democrats on a message for the emails investigation and, in a not-too-subtle jab at Comey, said she “followed the Department’s long-standing policy of neither confirming nor denying the fact of an ongoing investigation.”
Comey made the controversial move of announcing to Congress the FBI was reopening the emails investigation less than two weeks before the 2016 election. He again closed the investigation, citing no changes in the FBI’s view on the matter, a couple days before the Nov. 8 election, but Clinton and her allies have long blamed the optics of what Comey did for contributing to her loss to candidate Donald Trump.
Could Lynch still find herself in jeopardy? It appears so — something Wittes hinted at in his piece last week that attracted the attention of Fox News.
In the piece published Wednesday, while Wittes conceded Comey isn’t without blame for how he handled the FBI’s email investigation, the editor-in-chief of Lawfare said the consideration of other decision-makers, “particularly Lynch,” paint a full picture for those people who believe the probe was a “train wreck” that cost Clinton the 2016 presidential election.
Wittes also said he was “very much” looking forward to what the forthcoming Justice Department inspector general report on the Clinton email investigation has to say about Lynch.
Meanwhile, 11 House Republicans last week wrote a letter calling on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute a handful of individuals, calling for an “investigation of potential violation(s) of federal statutes.” One of the individuals named in that letter is Lynch. Another is Comey.
Comey has come under fire from prominent members of Congress for his meticulous note-taking of his conversations with Trump, who fired him last May, and subsequently leaking them to the press through a friend. Not only could he face trouble for potentially leaking classified information — a matter not under investigation by the DOJ inspector general — but questions are being raised why he didn’t take notes about his interactions with Lynch when he questioned her actions.
“[Y]ou did it to Trump to spur special counsel, but when Loretta Lynch, in your judgment, was not fit to oversee the Clinton email investigation, you didn’t say a word to anybody,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said on Brian Kilmeade’s radio show last week. He called this a “double standard and is antithetical to a book on ethics and morality.”
Even Wittes admitted Lynch is worth talking about, so long as her actions are placed in the context of a larger picture.
“[P]utting problems of priority and proportionality aside, isn’t Loretta Lynch also worth talking about?” one Twitter user asked Wittes on Sunday.
He replied: “Yes, absolutely–which is why I talked about her in my piece. But honestly, if that’s the ONLY thing you want to talk to me about in that piece, you’re reading very selectively.”
