Comey and the lessons of pre-capitulation
He tried to palliate bad faith Republicans. Now we're all paying the price.
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Former FBI Director James Comey was arguably one of the first consequential establishment figures to comply in advance with Donald Trump. For his trouble, and his pivotal role in vaulting Trump to power, he has now been targeted by Trump’s Justice Department for a politically motivated indictment.
The disgusting, undemocratic use of the justice system to further Trump’s petty feuds is ugly and terrifying. It’s also, in James Comey’s case, a lesson that other elites would do well to study. Bending over backwards to help Trump for any reason — to protect yourself, to demonstrate your bipartisan apolitical bona fides, to secure a government deal — absolutely never ends well.
Trump will come for you eventually. You might as well take a stand and fight when it matters.
The OG Trump enabler
Though it’s been largely forgotten (or deliberately erased) by MAGA, Comey was crucial to Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. In that race, Trump was running against former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, who was dogged by a scandal involving improper use of a private email server while in office.
Given Trump-era scandals about government communications — like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sharing actual operational attack details with a reporter in a Signal chat — Clinton’s procedural oversight looks trivial to say the least. At the time, however, Comey, as head of the FBI, took it extremely seriously.
In July 2016, at a news conference in which he announced that Clinton would not be indicted, Comey took the extraordinary step of lambasting her, calling her “extremely careless.” It was as if Comey wanted Clinton be sure that her official exoneration was not treated as an exoneration.
Then, 11 days before the election, Comey went even further. He notified Congress, and therefore the public, that an investigation into Clinton had been reopened to review newly acquired emails found on the laptop of disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner. The emails were investigated and found to be innocuous, but the damage was done.
In the last days of the campaign voters were reminded via blanket coverage of Clinton’s most persistent scandal. Election analyst Nate Silver believes that Comey’s decision to go public tilted the extremely close election, securing an electoral college win for Trump.
The obvious question here is, why? Why did Comey spend 2016 violating the longstanding norms against the FBI needlessly interfering in elections? Why was he so intent on publicly sticking a fairly minor scandal to Clinton, even as the agency tiptoed around the Trump campaign’s much more consequential and dangerous collusion with Russia?
Comey has admitted he was motivated in part by the fact that he (like a lot of the white political establishment) was certain Clinton was going to win. In his memoir he wrote, “Assuming, as nearly everyone did, that Hillary Clinton would be elected president of the United States in less than two weeks, what would happen to the FBI, the Justice Department or her own presidency if it later was revealed, after the fact, that she still was the subject of an FBI investigation?”
This doesn’t quite tell the whole story though. Comey was worried that revelations about Clinton emails would damage the FBI because he thought they would be weaponized by bad faith Republicans. According to reporting by ProPublica, Comey was worried that if he did not release info about the Weiner emails, anti-Clinton FBI agents in New York might leak them. FBI officials also, according to ProPublica, feared “the prospect of oversight hearings, led by restive Republicans investigating an FBI ‘cover-up.’”
In that context, Comey’s actions look similar to billionaire Jeff Bezos rushing to block a Washington Post editorial endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024. Bezos was worried that Trump might win and cancel his government contracts, so he rushed to comply in advance, figuring he would immunize himself from Republican reprisals. Similarly, Comey decided that he needed to pre-kowtow to the right to protect the FBI and the Justice Department from the wrath of angry Republicans in Congress and the media.
Republicans have spent decades now stoking fake outrage and fake moral panics. Many elite figures like Bezos and Comey — or like Obama and Biden in their handling of immigration policy — tend to respond by trying to conceding ground. They try to be fair to Republicans in hopes that the bullies will be satisfied and will not attack them, their institutions, and their interests.
Removing your spine is bad for your health
Fighting is unpleasant, uncomfortable, and can lead to getting hurt. It’s reasonable to avoid fighting when you can — and as a result appeasement often looks like the reasonable, better path.
Hand over the Sudentenland, ditch the pro-Harris editorial, ramp up immigration enforcement, make the probably nothingburger investigation public — these aren’t major concessions. Give the rabid dog a slab of meat, and it won’t chew off your arm. What could go wrong?
Unfortunately, as the Trump era has demonstrated, the answer to the question turns out to be, “absolutely everything, oh my god, we are in hell.” In Comey’s case in particular, hyper focus on Clinton’s minor misstep, and his refusal to seriously investigate Trump’s Russian ties, threw the election to a man whom Comey later described as “unethical and untethered.”
The result was a personal disaster for Comey. Trump fired him early in his first term when Comey insisted on investigating the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia and refused to guarantee Trump that he would not himself be the focus of the probe.
Long term, the agency whose neutrality and independence Comey thought he was courageously defending has been gutted. An unqualified hack has been put in charge of the FBI and is using the agency to target Trump’s political enemies; agents have been fired for nakedly political reasons. Now Comey himself has been indicted. Everything he hoped to achieve by palliating the GOP — personally, politically, institutionally — has failed. He destroyed himself and everything he cared about.
Comey’s response to this self-immolation has in some respects been admirable. He’s been forthright and even inspiring in his opposition to Trump.
“My heart is broken for the Department of Justice,” he said in a stirring Instagram post after his indictment. “But I have great confidence in the federal judicial system and I’m innocent, so let’s have a trial.”
What Comey has not done, though, is to honestly grapple with the dynamics which led him to interfere in the 2016 election and plunge the entire country into this nightmare from which we are, seemingly, never going to wake up. He has continued to maintain that he did the right thing in 2016.
“I believed — and still believe, even in hindsight — it was the best thing for the FBI and for the Department of Justice” he said in his memoir of his treatment of Hillary Clinton in 2016, adding that “the American people needed and deserved transparency.” He wrote that in 2018, but in the years since, he has still been unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge there is a difference between “transparency” and targeting Democrats in order to ward off right-wing attacks.
Comey was in fact wrong to go public with half-baked, weak-sauce allegations against Clinton — even if he thought she’d win, even if he feared Republican reprisals, even if he didn’t trust his own right-wing agents. He caved in advance in the hopes that the leopards would turn to other prey. Instead, the leopards ate his face, and the FBI’s face, and the face of the whole country.
We need to stand with Comey now against Trump’s ugly authoritarian abuses. But we also need to recognize that Comey’s strategy of pre-capitulation got him, and all of us, into this mess in the first place. Other institutionalists, pragmatists, and would-be non-partisans are going to face the kinds of choices and incentives that Comey did. Hopefully they will look at the sad, gutted remnants of his beloved Justice Department and choose a different path.
That’s it for today
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Thank you! Cogent and concise. All the inchoate, contradictory feelings I’m had about the Comey situation explained and contextualized. A Public Notice and a Public Service.
As graphic as it is, Noah, I appreciate this beyond measure:
‘He caved in advance in the hopes that the leopards would turn to other prey. Instead, the leopards ate his face, and the FBI’s face, and the face of the whole country.’