Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey, a longtime friend of special counsel Robert Mueller, seems to be dissatisfied with his buddy’s decision to not render a judgment on obstruction of justice and instead punt the issue to Attorney General Bill Barr.
“The part that’s confusing is, I can’t quite understand what’s going on with the obstruction stuff,” he said Tuesday at a Queens University event in Charlotte, North Carolina, according to The Charlotte Observer, adding that though he has “great faith” in Mueller, his decision makes little sense.
“I just can’t tell from the letter why didn’t he decide these questions when the entire rationale for a special counsel is to make sure the politicals aren’t making the key charging decisions.”
By “letter” he meant the public letter Barr submitted to Congress on Sunday detailing the results of the collusion investigation. And by “politicals” he presumably meant Barr himself. Comey appears to be among those mainly on the left who view the attorney general as a “political appointee” whose words and actions can’t be trusted. Never mind Barr’s track record of excellence.
“During President George H. W. Bush’s administration, Barr served as attorney general, deputy attorney general and assistant attorney general at the Office of Legal Counsel. After government service, he became the general counsel at Verizon, and he has served on the board of TimeWarner,” Matthew Heiman of the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law noted earlier this year after Barr’s nomination by Trump.
There’s a huge difference between the Barr Letter and Mueller Report. One took 2 days. One took 2 years. One we have seen. One a Trump political appointee hasn’t shared. If you don’t think this is a coverup, you aren’t paying attention.
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) March 24, 2019
“Given Attorney General Barr’s role as a political appointee… we must demand transparency and read it ourselves to draw our own conclusions.”
–@repmarkpocan joins other Dems in calling on the DOJ to #ReleaseTheReport.#MuellerReport pic.twitter.com/17HgWHj8wS
— Taurean Small (@taureansmall) March 25, 2019
Precedent: Special counsel reports on allegations of wrongdoing by a president are released in full to Congress.
Unprecedented: A president’s political appointee releases only his interpretation of the report.
#ReleaseTheFullReport, Mr. Barr.— Rep. Andy Levin (@RepAndyLevin) March 25, 2019
While Mueller chose to exonerate President Donald Trump on allegations that he colluded with Russian operatives to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, he essentially left the obstruction of justice issue hanging and open to interpretation.
The special counsel reportedly informed Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein of his decision in early March, thus giving him three weeks to review the facts.
On Sunday, two days after Mueller formally submitted his report to the Department of Justice, the AG announced that he and Rosenstein had decided to nor pursue obstruction of justice charges.
He explained their rationale as being that, since Trump didn’t collude with Russian operatives to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, there was nothing for him to obstruct.
“In making this determination, we noted that the Special Counsel recognized that ‘the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference,’ and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction,” he wrote.
As dissatisfied as Comey is with Mueller, he’s even more dissatisfied with Barr.
“The notion that obstruction cases are somehow undermined by the absence of proof of an underlying crime, that is not my experience in 40 years of doing this nor is it the Department of Justice’s tradition,” he said. “Obstruction crimes matter without regard to what you prove about the underlying crime.”
He also took shots at the Republican Party, of which he used to be a member.
“With the 2020 election ramping up, Comey, a former Republican, said the Republican party has ‘changed in a way that makes it unrecognizable to me,'” the Observer reported. “He recalled Sen. Joe McCarthy, whose ‘Red Scare’ tactics and Communist hunts dominated politics for years in the early 1950s, before McCarthy’s abrupt downfall.”
“Demagogue fevers break very quickly,” Comey said. “He (McCarthy) disappeared from the national stage, and then there was a lot of explaining to do. I expect that history to repeat itself.”
The irony is that it’s already repeated itself thanks to Democrats, not Republicans. It’s Democrats and their allies in the media who’ve spent the last two to three years accusing Trump and his family of being traitors to America, and who are now so invested in this false narrative that they’re outright refusing to accept the results of Mueller’s costly investigation.
Leading the charge is the modern day Joe McCarthy himself, House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, who’s so desperate to uncover wrongdoing by the president that he’s threatened to subpoena Mueller and Barr and doubled down on claims of collusion.
“Undoubtedly there is collusion,” he told The Washington Post this week. We will continue to investigate the counterintelligence issues. That is, is the president or people around him compromised in any way by a hostile foreign power?”
There’s your Joe McCarthy, Comey.
McCarthyism is alive and well in Schiff. The response is….. pic.twitter.com/grZE4qMnwu
— Dogofwar (@Dogofwar12) March 26, 2019
@RepAdamSchiff needs to resign. Introducing #McCarthyism into 21st Century America must be penalized. @TheDemocrats are anti-American, pro-Totalitarian, and anti-Justice now. pic.twitter.com/DiohBMSYUh
— Mike Kuffar ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? (@BetrCutlerLoose) March 26, 2019
Republicans call for discredited, repellent Rep. #AdamSchiff —the New Joe McCarthy—to resign, from intelligence committee | #Collusion #CollusionHoax #MuellerReport #McCarthyite #McCarthyism https://t.co/3gBx1DyN8q
— Foreign Confidential (@ForeignC) March 26, 2019
@RepAdamSchiff Your fake McCarthyism is over Resign
— Richard Jones (@TomFalvo) March 25, 2019
The fact that Comey sees everything backwards and thinks that Republicans are the McCarthyites suggests he ought to be angry with himself for being a blind, delusional fool.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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