Getty Opinion Comey's fizzle

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico Magazine.

James Comey has an expectations problem.

By any reasonable standard, his testimony about his service under President Donald Trump and his cashiering would be damaging perhaps to the point of debilitating. But his account has been billed as Watergate and the Clinton impeachment rolled into one, another step toward Trump getting permanently helicoptered out of the White House in a Nixonian tableau, and by this unreasonable standard, Comey looks to be a fizzle.


Judging only by his statement for the record provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee (perhaps the live testimony will play differently), Comey doesn’t have Trump nailed for high crimes and misdemeanors. Rather, he has him dead to rights for amateurish and ham-handed scheming, which is not an impeachable offense.

The document has considerable entertainment value in its dead-pan account of a profound mismatch, a Washington buddy movie gone bad. It’s a tale of a bureaucratically agile and self-serving careerist matched against an institutionally ignorant and self-serving outsider. One is careful, memorializing every conversation and calculating his every more; the other is blundering around in the dark — and eventually blows the whole thing up.

The narrative that Democrats want to believe is that Trump is in so deep with the Russians that he took the incredible risk of firing his FBI director to cover his tracks. The picture in the Comey memo is instead of a president driven mad by the investigation, in particular by his inability to get the FBI director to say publicly that he isn’t under investigation — when, in fact, he isn’t under investigation.

It’s impossible to know anything for certain without all of the underlying facts of the Russia controversy, but the Comey statement tends to support the idea that Trump was acting out of a sense of wronged innocence, rather than of one-step-ahead-of-the-law guilt.

Perhaps the biggest revelation in the statement (much of which had already been leaked) is that Trump was correct when he said in his missive firing Comey that the FBI director had told him no less than three times that he wasn’t under investigation. What are the odds?

Amazingly enough, according to Comey, the director repeatedly told Trump he wasn’t under investigation without the president even asking him. Obsessed with the “cloud” the Russia probe had created, Trump became desperate to get this fact out in the public and badgered Comey about it, to no avail.

Here, once again, Comey’s subjective standard for talking publicly became a highly politicized flash point. Comey said the Hillary Clinton investigation was closed, open, and closed during the campaign. A couple of months ago, he told a congressional committee that a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign was ongoing. Comey talks — a lot.

Besides telling Trump he wasn’t under investigation, Comey had briefed congressional leaders, telling them the same thing. It wasn’t crazy for Trump to wonder why, with so much blabbing, Comey couldn’t simply let this be known? Especially with half the political universe believing that the authorities were rapidly closing in on Trump.

A fair-minded reading of the Comey statement strongly implies that Trump’s frustration over this, rather than an attempt to shutter the Russian investigation, was the proximate cause for Comey’s dismissal. Indeed, the statement provides some evidence that Trump didn’t particularly want to shut down the Russia probe.

When Trump asked Comey in the Oval Office to lay off his just-fired national security adviser Michael Flynn, Comey says he understood this request to be only about Flynn, not about Russia. In a later conversation, as Comey puts it, “The President went on to say that if there were some ‘satellite’ associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out.”

In other words: Have at it with Manafort, Page, and Stone, et. al. Democrats will have to labor mightily to try build this into an obstruction case.

Which is not to deny the damning aspects of the Comey statement:

It makes it clear, if any doubt remained, that the Rod Rosenstein memo cataloguing Comey’s mishandling of the Clinton case prior to his firing was always a smokescreen. Comey’s dismissal was all about the headache he caused Trump.

Trump’s request that Comey not pursue a case against Flynn wasn’t illegal. Trump expressed a hope and an opinion (Flynn had already been punished enough), and didn’t issue an order to drop the case. Even if he had, it would only be obstruction if he had corrupt intent, for which there is no evidence. Still, this conversation was foolhardy and inappropriate.

Finally, there is no universe where it is OK for a president to demand “loyalty” of his FBI director, as Comey alleges Trump did during their one-on-one dinner at the White House.

No doubt, if a Democratic president had behaved this way, Republicans would be going bonkers. The Comey statement is a stinging portrait of a president who doesn’t understand or evidently much care how our government is supposed to work. But that falls short of what Democrats, in their current fevered state, have hyped all of this into. They hope and expect to get a swift hanging. The Comey statement suggests one isn’t in the offing.