The Insufferable James Comey

Never before has a former FBI director boasted about taking advantage of an administration's disorganization for his own ends.

But never before has a former FBI director been as self-satisfied as James Brien Comey Jr.

In an interview this month with Nicolle Wallace at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, Comey delighted his Upper East Side audience with his tale of how he exploited the Trump White House's disarray in its initial days to send two FBI agents to talk to then-national security advisor Michael Flynn without honoring the usual processes (e.g., working through the White House counsel's office).

Comey said that in a different administration that's "something I probably wouldn't have done or maybe gotten away with." He apparently didn't consider how that might sound to anyone not already inclined to delight in the wit and wisdom of James Comey, or old enough to remember when an FBI director pushing to "get away" with things wasn't so amusing.

A lot of people have been diminished by the Trump years, Comey among them. A best-selling author with more than a million followers on Twitter, he's a bigger political figure than ever before, but has revealed himself to be exactly what his harshest critics always said — a politically savvy operator who matches his bureaucratic skills with an impregnable sense of self-righteousness.

The conundrum of Comey was that he deserved to be fired, but firing him — certainly the way President Donald Trump did it — was the worst mistake of Trump's presidency. It would have been better to have Comey inside the tent leaking and maneuvering for his own advantage than to have him outside leaking and maneuvering for his advantage.

Comey is a smart and capable man. In many ways, he was a good FBI director. His fault was always being too clever by half and having too keen an eye for his own image and political interest.

He bent over backward to get to the conclusion that President Barack Obama and his Justice department wanted in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, then decided to speak out about the matter lest people think his decision was tainted by Attorney General Loretta Lynch's notorious tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton.

Comey thus ignored the law in the Clinton case and ignored Justice Department rules in talking about it.

Comey may have been a law unto himself, but there shouldn't be any doubt that he knows what he's doing.

After Trump fired him, Comey had one of his friends leak contents of a memo to The New York Times in the hopes that it would catalyze the appointment of a special counsel. Sure enough, we got a special counsel.

A special-counsel probe is an act of punishment against any administration subjected to it. It will cause distraction, legal fees, and heartache — in the best case. Even if a probe doesn't land the investigative big fish — in this case, collusion — it will usually find wrongdoing, often process crimes involving the investigation itself (especially when dealing with such a dishonest group of people).

A practiced Washington player, Comey knew all of this. That he's so deft makes his slipperiness about inconvenient matters related to the investigation all the more telling.

He's been consistently unfazed that the dossier compiling allegations about Trump and Russia was funded by the Democrats. In his latest round of Congress questioning, he still maintained — when he should know better — that Republicans funded the dossier first (actually, the GOP oppo effort stopped after the primaries and before the dossier began to be compiled).

Comey said in interviews on his book tour that he didn't recall telling Congress that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn didn't believe he was lying. Yet, the record shows he did say it, and indeed the agents didn't believe Flynn was lying.

One little item from Comey's recent congressional questioning is astonishingly lawyerly, even for him. Then-chief of staff Reince Priebus asked Comey whether a conversation they were about to have was private. Comey said it was, despite the fact that he would write a memo about their talk and it would — of course — make it into the press. Asked by Rep. Trey Gowdy about how he used the word "private," Comey answered that he meant he and Priebus were the only two people in the room.

As if that was what Priebus wanted to know.

Comey is not so careful about parsing terms when he blasts Trump and calls for his defeat. He is acting under extreme provocation, but he seems unaware that his pronouncements as a private citizen cast a pall over his public service when he wielded some of the most sensitive powers of government.

None of Trump's attacks on Comey has been as damning as the supposedly by-the-book FBI director admitting he did an end run around process in the Flynn interview, and soaking up laughter and applause for it.
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