Over at Lawfareblog, they’ve gotten a hold of a cache of e-mails from inside the FBI from the immediate aftermath of the president*’s firing of director James Comey. These are significant in a couple of ways: first, the release of these e-mails can fairly be seen as a counterstroke against the president* and his congressional dogsled team, and second, they give a pretty good look at the kind of chaos that Comey’s firing occasioned in the Bureau’s rank and file.

When President Trump fired James Comey as FBI director last May, the special agent in charge of the Detroit field office, David Gelios, wrote an email to his staff: “ I just saw CNN reporting that Director Comey has been fired by President Trump. I have no notification from HQ of any such thing. If I receive any information from HQ, I will advise. I’d ask all to stand by for clarification of this reporting. I am only sending this because I want everyone to know I have received no HQ confirmation of the reporting. I hope this is an instance of fake news.”

Oh, and the e-mails also provide further evidence that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is an utterly truthless drone whose daily briefings are unworthy of serious attention. At the time Comey was fired, the White House line, peddled by SarahHuck and by the vulgar talking yam for whom she works, was that agents in the Bureau had “lost confidence” in Comey’s leadership. (At the time, the president*, of course, would undercut his own outrageous lie by telling Lester Holt that he canned Comey over the Russia thing.) These e-mails show a sense of outrage among the grunts in the field offices on whose behalf Sanders and Trump presumed to speak.

Before detailing the story these documents tell, let’s pause a moment over the story they do not tell. They contain not a word that supports the notion that the FBI was in turmoil. They contain not a word that reflects gratitude to the president for removing a nut job. There is literally not a single sentence in any of these communications that reflects criticism of Comey’s leadership of the FBI. Not one special agent in charge describes Comey’s removal as some kind of opportunity for new leadership. And if any FBI official really got on the phone with Sanders to express gratitude or thanks “for the president’s decision,” nobody reported that to his or her staff.

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They also reveal the confusion within the Bureau as they tried to get Comey, who was on the west coast at the time, back to Washington. This occasioned a fit from the president*, whom everybody sensibly ignored.

After the president fired Comey there was some uncertainty about whether Comey, as a former FBI employee, would have to pay his way home from LAX or would be able to use the director’s plane. NBC recently reported that an irate Trump called McCabe a day after the firing asking why Comey had been permitted to return to Washington on an FBI plane. McCabe indicated that he hadn’t been consulted about the use of the plane but, had anyone asked, he would have approved the request. Thanks to one of these emails, we now have a small window into what went on at the FBI at the time. On May 11, Gregory Cox, assistant director of the Critical Incident Response Group, emailed all of the Critical Incident Response Group thanking “all who were involved in efforts to bring home former Director Comey from Los Angeles on Tuesday evening.” The apparent defiance may be subtle, but it is unmistakable. Cox may not have known that his email dealt with a point the president had personally raised with the acting director, but he thanked his people for doing the right thing by Comey irrespective of politics he was surely aware of in a generic sense.

I don’t minimize how thoroughly Comey bungled at the end of the 2016 presidential campaign. If what he’s doing now is atonement, that’s only right. He has a lot for which he should atone. But the sense of dislocation in these e-mails shows where the current propaganda war against the FBI first took root. It’s where the water first went muddy.

It is the most elemental form of the ongoing damage that is no worse than even money to keep us from ever knowing everything about the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election, and to prevent us from taking the steps we need to prevent the same thing happening in 2018 and 2020. This, of course, may be the whole point.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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