Don Surber bestowed the perfect nickname on James Comey, the fired FBI director: Jimmy the Weasel. I much prefer it to other nickname bandied about for him, "The Cardinal." While that name captures the sanctimony of the man, it is entirely unfair to the College of Cardinals and misses the other repulsive aspect of Comey: his slipperiness. In addition, a cardinal of the Church is an admirable position, a person who, at least in principle, was chosen on the basis of his virtue. In contrast, "Jimmy the Weasel" connotes a gangster.

I have embedded the entire interview of Comey that Chris Wallace of Fox News conducted yesterday at the bottom of this blog post. But for those with a less than gigantic tolerance of slippery evasiveness, I have three mercifully short segments below in which Comey claims that as a director of an agency with 30,000 employees, he wasn't on top of activity "seven levels below" his office. (This ignores the fact that the team persecuting the case was hand-picked and that, as Wallace points out, this was a case surveilling the President of the United States, not a routine case in anyone's book. That the top official of the FBI would not be closely monitoring such a historic operation is beyond belief.)

Even when he says he is "wrong," it is others' fault. He was mistaken in relying on the FBI procedures developed over the last 20 years — you see, it was he who was betrayed.

Perhaps most repulsively, Comey quibbles about I.G. Horowitz's testimony that no one was vindicated, saying it depends on the meaning of the word "vindicated," bringing to mind Bill Clinton's notorious dodge that it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. And worse, he goes on to challenge FBI critics:

What I mean is the FBI was accused of treason, of illegal spying, tapping Mr. Trump's wires illegally, opening an investigation without justification and being a criminal conspiracy to unseat — defeat and then unseat a president. All of that was nonsense.

Here is the entire interview for those with strong stomachs:

With all the sliminess on display, if you want to watch the whole thing, you may want to take a shower afterward.

Photo credit: YouTube screen grab.