Comey, stop embarrassing retired FBI agents like me
by James A. Gagliano
| April 13, 2020 12:31 PM
He’s back, and the obvious irony can only be lost on James Comey. The former FBI director penned another laughably absurd opinion piece for the Washington Post on Saturday. In a week that contained further revelations that his Crossfire Hurricane team turned a blind eye to evidence that the Steele dossier was a heaping pile of Russian disinformation campaign garbage, Comey’s column on "crisis leadership" drops. Though his St. James schtick has long been acknowledged as beyond parody, Comey’s sense of twisted timing here is truly jaw-dropping.
When Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in his 434-page report in December 2019 that the opening of Crossfire Hurricane was properly predicated, he also issued a blistering rebuke of FBI leadership for “significant inaccuracies and omissions.†While Horowitz could not definitively prove bias was injected into the FBI’s investigation into Trump-Russia collusion, he did not disprove it either. The well-chronicled litany of FBI malfeasance included the withholding and falsification of information provided to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as well as relying on uncorroborated and unverified intelligence and operating a discredited source (Christopher Steele) known to be unreliable and to have exhibited outright partisan animus toward the target (Donald Trump) of his investigation.
If this were simply a case of the FBI’s confirmation bias, as I once argued, this would be a damning episode of circular reasoning — a logical fallacy that can permeate high-level, insular circles of senior leadership in a bureaucracy. And honorable patriots can unwittingly fall prey to this malady. But Horowitz’s report also underscored some far more sinister and pernicious findings in Comey’s team. A Yahoo News article, sourced by Steele, was utilized to corroborate the dossier. Horowitz, called to testify in front of Congress about his report, pushed back on assertions that it “exonerated the FBI.†He argued that his team “did not reach that conclusion.â€
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/james-comey-stop-embarrassing-the-fbi
