Comey Spying on Trump

For John, BLUF:  It isn't good for the bureaucrats, including law enforcement, to be judging a president at the very beginning of an administration.  After all, the People did vote.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Justice Dept. Watchdog Has Evidence Comey Probed Trump, on the Sly

From Real Clear Investigations, by Mr Paul Sperry, 22 July 2019.

Here is the lede plus seven:

Two U.S. officials briefed on the inspector general’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the president, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration.  They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during that January 2017 meeting in New York.

In addition to adding notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter.

Although Comey took many actions on his own, he was not working in isolation.  One focus of Horowitz’s inquiry is the private Jan. 6, 2017, briefing Comey gave the president-elect in New York about material in the Democratic-commissioned dossier compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.  Reports of that meeting were used days later by BuzzFeed, CNN and other outlets as a news hook for reporting on the dossier’s lascivious and unsubstantiated claims.

Comey’s meeting with Trump took place one day after the FBI director met in the Oval Office with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to discuss how to brief Trump — a meeting attended by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who would soon go to work for CNN.

In his memoir, the former FBI director denied having "a counterintelligence case file open" on Trump -- at least not in the "literal" sense.

In his recently published memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey denied having "a counterintelligence case file open on [Trump],” though he qualified the denial by adding this was true only in the “literal” sense.  He also twice denied investigating Trump, under oath, in congressional testimony.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who has written extensively on the Trump-Russia probe as a columnist for National Review, said that just because the president’s name was not put on a file or a surveillance warrant does not mean the Comey FBI was not investigating him.  “They were hoping to surveil him incidentally, and they were trying to make a case on him,” McCarthy said.  “The real reason Comey did not want to repeat publicly the assurances he made to Trump privately is that these assurances were misleading.  The FBI strung Trump along, telling him he was not a suspect while structuring the investigation in accordance with the reality that Trump was the main subject."

But, former FBI counterintelligence agent and lawyer Mark Wauck said, the FBI lacked legal grounds to treat Trump as a suspect. “They had no probable cause against Trump himself for ‘collusion’ or espionage,” he said.  “They were scrambling to come up with anything to hang a hat on, but had found nothing.”

Standing back and seeing no FEC violations, one can't help but wonder if it wasn't just animus from the "Deep State".  Of course, the unwillingness of many Democrats to believe and accept the election results added to the problem.

And, we might ask how we would react if we came into a new job, under a cloud of suspicion and were not sure we Old trust the police investigators, who had been hiding things from us.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff