After all, his most prominent prosecution in his career as U.S. Attorney was convicting Martha Stewart -- not for actual insider securities trading, but for lying to the FBI and misleading her investors by proclaiming her innocence. No matter, Comey the hi-octane prosecutor saved the securities industry from the ravages of Martha -- the master manipulator of stuffed endive ginger dip.

For all of his stage-crafted gravitas and preening, James Comey was a bantamweight, yearning to be anointed with the heavyweight crown by securing a lifetime sinecure from the Deep State.

And with that coveted scalp, later as assistant AG under John Ashcroft, Comey appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to be the special prosecutor who nailed Dick Cheney’s aide Scooter Libby -- not for the actual unmasking of Valerie Plame, a purported undercover CIA operative -- but for obstructing the investigation. Fitzgerald, and Comey knew from the beginning the identity of the leaker, Colin Powell’s assistant Richard Armitage. While both Armitage and Powell continued their duplicitous silent assent to damaging W’s second term, Comey did nothing to stop this miscarriage.

Comey’s reputation as an even-handed government lawyer isn’t as fair-and-balanced as it would seem at first blush. His participation in the whitewash of the Clinton Whitewater cover up, when he was assistant counsel for the Senate Whitewater Committee, was accompanied by a simultaneous assertion that the Clintons engaged in “a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct.”

Later, as U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, his Vidi aquam over the corrupt Bill Clinton pardon of Marc Rich, an alleged quid pro quo for campaign contributions, betrayed Comey’s own role as a prosecutor working for Rudy Giuliani’s successful conviction of Rich’s tax evasion fifteen years earlier.

To what end was Comey’s convenient and cynical equivocations? Mere warm-ups for his disgraceful tenure at the FBI.

Comey’s fitness report while heading the FBI is a compendium of incompetence, and dissembling, beyond his blockade-running interference for Hillary’s email felonies, and AG Loretta Lynch’s deliberately compromising encounter with Bill Clinton on the Phoenix airport tarmac:

The FBI ignored the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston Marathon bombing.

The FBI ignored U.S. Army psychiatrist and jihadist Nidal Hasan before he murdered 31 people at Fort Hood.

The FBI ignored the San Bernardino terrorist killers Farook and Malik; then in an unforced fiasco bullied Apple for a needless unlocking key to the killers’ IPhone.

An FBI agent was actually following the Garland, Texas shooters without notifying local law enforcement that armed men were about to carry out a terrorist attack.

The FBI ignored Orlando nightclub massacre terrorist Omar Mateen, while under intermittent surveillance, whose lies to the FBI were known by the FBI interrogators.

The FBI has done zero investigation into who leaked classified info on Michael Flynn, nor the unmasking of more than a thousand private U.S. citizens, along with who spied on Trump and members of Congress.

The FBI has demurred in investigating the Clinton Foundation

Overcoming his record in hardcore prosecutions of first-order crimes, Comey became an accomplished sifter of fly ash, alternating hiding behind investigation protocols when politically convenient, then asserting prosecutorial zeal when personally advantageous.

For all of the dubious claims that Comey “hated the Clintons’”, and “discomforted the Democrats”, his own carefully constructed slow-walking misdirection methods made him indispensable to the Clintons’ political viability, while allowing them to evade criminal indictments. Until Trump fired him, Comey also had been the Democrats’ most productive enabler for subverting the Trump presidency, by creating a persistent cloud of innuendo, promoting interminable suspicions of unspecified, undefined, and unsubstantiated misdeeds committed by unidentified perpetrators.

Still, Comey elicits undeserved sympathy. Michael Barone says untimely intersections with the Clintons have rendered him another hapless victim, “Can something be said in defense of Comey? He was put in a terrible position by Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Obama Justice Department.”

Baloney.

It is a myth that Comey is a dispassionate balanced arbiter of justice. As WSJ’s Kimberly Strassel pointed out,

“So what should an honor-bound FBI director do in such a conflicted situation? Call it out. Demand that Ms. Lynch recuse herself and insist on an appropriate process to ensure public confidence. Resign, if need be. Instead Mr. Comey waited until the situation had become a crisis, and then he ignored all protocol to make himself investigator, attorney, judge and jury.”

Convincing the Deep State to trust him as “investigator, attorney, judge, and jury” is precisely how Comey measured himself for a lifetime Kevlar wardrobe. Comey bet that the Deep State power of the federal government rested with the Democrats, confident Hillary would shake off the tarnish from the email scandal, Benghazi, and her string of unindicted crimes and misdemeanors.

But Comey didn’t count on Donald Trump. Comey thought Trump a fool, more blusterer than disrupter, with an untethered temperament, and not a threat.

Instead Trump dropped his own bunker buster MOAB on Comey’s underground warrens, ending Comey’s sinecure, while unmasking the Democrats reliance on Comey to facilitate their malfeasant undermining of the president.

Trump’s manner in firing Comey, by all conventional assessments, has been a crippling political communications debacle. It is hard to imagine Trump deliberately intending to create such a firestorm to accompany a seemingly unremarkable personnel move that on the surface should have been endorsed by all sides of the political establishment.

Still, the collateral political damage that Trump brought upon himself in the manner of getting rid of Comey doesn’t negate the need to have done it, and thereby commencing the war against the Deep State. Trump had to start it, somehow, someplace. Comey was as good as any place to begin, maybe the best.

Mercilessly Trump fired the first consequential blow against the Deep State. That’s why we voted for him.

Now Trump needs to finish what he started. Cleaning up his communications farce in the meantime would only be a bonus. After all, we can’t savor the disruption, and its aftershock, if we have to apologize for it.