James Comey, Hoisted upon His Own Self-Regard
By Jim Geraghty
August 29, 2019 1:33 PM
There will be a lot of damning sections in the new Department of Justice Inspector General report on former FBI director James Comey, but this section in the conclusion is perhaps the most important:
[FBI] employees may disagree with decisions by prosecutors, judges, or higher-ranking FBI and Department officials about the actions to take or not take in criminal and counterintelligence matters. They may even, in some situations, distrust the legitimacy of those supervisory, prosecutorial, or judicial decisions. But even when these employees believe that their most strongly-held personal convictions might be served by an unauthorized disclosure, the FBI depends on them not to disclose sensitive information.
Even when these employees believe that their most strongly-held personal convictions might be served by an unauthorized disclosure, the FBI depends on them not to disclose sensitive information. Former Director Comey failed to live up to this responsibility. By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees—and the many thousands more former FBI employees—who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information. Comey said he was compelled to take these actions “if I love this country…and I love the Department of Justice, and I love the FBI.â€
However, were current or former FBI employees to follow the former Director’s example and disclose sensitive information in service of their own strongly held personal convictions, the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly, as Comey himself noted in his March 20, 2017 congressional testimony… This is no doubt part of the reason why Comey’s closest advisors used the words “surprised,†“stunned,†“shocked,†and “disappointment†to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/james-comey-hoist-upon-his-own-self-regard/
