Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton sat down with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour as part of a “Women for Women International” event in New York City. She took off her gloves and attacked FBI Director James Comey for being the reason behind her loss against Donald Trump. Clinton told a jubilant Christiane Amanpour, that up until the day Comey announced the reopening of the probe into Clinton’s e-mails, she was on her way to the White House.
Before this interview, Democratic opposition had started finally to sort of move past Clinton’s defeat and all the wish-wash about how they won the popular vote and Trump stole the election. They started to close ranks against the new Trump administration in town. They were holding the administration accountable on multiple issues: Immigration, health care, foreign policy, relations with Moscow and finally their big focus investigation into Trump campaign’s ties to Vladimir Putin and Wikileaks. These were times when opposition against the Trump administration was being derailed by leaks, exaggerated claims of Russian presence at the White House and difficulty in dissecting real news from a sea of fake reports and publications in Washington.
It was already tough for the Democratic leadership to focus on policy issues that mattered, whether on climate, judiciary or health care under these circumstances. Since the election in November, it has become almost impossible to be statesmen in America. All of a sudden in Washington, a reality show star is the president, and everything else is either Putin or Richard Nixon.
After all, if you’re a hammer, everything else looks like a nail. These days, if you are a Democrat, everything else is Russian.
Let’s go back to Clinton’s interview. Listening to her interview, I immediately thought her campaign manager John Podesta on the election night November 8. In Paris, it was sometime between 7 and 8 AM. The guy who put the nation at a civil war level alarms when Trump refused to say whether he would concede once defeated, refused to concede to the results himself.
The same ideas that hurt the Democratic Party during the 2016 elections are still shaping the Democratic Party of today. Somehow, someway, Clinton is still steering the Democratic Party leadership.
But to be fair, Clinton was not the only Democrat discrediting Comey in the past six months. California Representative Maxime Waters publicly called on ending Comey’s leadership of the FBI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q_9uQc9U7k
Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Grassley were other senior democrats who discredited Comey. Then, there were the never-ending leaks that democrats willingly or unwillingly pushed forward without considering the harm it could cause the FBI.
Many Democrats coupled with the media thought lightly of this. It is better to have leaks to keep the Americans informed about the White House and the Russian smoke, they argued. Hours later, FBI Director Comey would refuse to confirm or deny the reports, leaving the entire world puzzled.
We even heard one day that Comey was furious at President Donald Trump for blaming former President Barack Obama of ordering surveillance of his campaign. If you are wondering how we learned of this? A leaked report to the media.
Finally, just a day before Trump fires Comey as the director of the FBI, some media outlets and Democrats doubled down against director Comey for again misleading (basically lied) to a Congressional hearing when he said that Clinton top aide Huma Abedin forwarded to her husband Anthony Weiner thousands of Hillary emails.
Whether directly or indirectly, such attacks on the FBI, coupled with the president’s claims against Comey of being too nice with Hillary definitely harmed the reputation of FBI’s leadership.
In light of Comey’s dismissal from the leadership of the bureau, most Democrats and media outlets that openly function in their name are taking the fight to another level. Neither however, are serving the country’s interests at this point.
Had Democrats been supportive of the rule of law, they wouldn’t have spent months discrediting the outgoing FBI Director, forcing out leaks on ongoing or past investigations. Had they been supportive of impartial investigation into Russian meddling in US Elections, they wouldn’t have called the director a disgrace and attacked him day in, day out on the major news outlets. Going back on record to attack Comey for his handling of probes into the email story, Hillary Clinton reignited the intelligence and media war against him.
By adopting Hillary’s strategy against the FBI, Democrats have thus lost a key leverage against the Trump Administration if the Russian meddling smoke was to turn into a fire.
I agree that at times President Trump still acts in a campaign mode and not coming out clear on his campaign’s links to Russia would derail his presidency, but the bigger problem is that Democrats still find it difficult to accept that the United States has a new president who has a constitutional authority bestowed in him. Hoping that a new president has no right to use his constitutional prerogatives is simply, to use former VP Joe Biden’s words, “malarkey.”
In the past year, Democrats have been successful and convincing in one campaign. To discredit and end the leadership of James Comey as the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But they just wanted to end his leadership under a Clinton Administration, not by President Trump.
