• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

Comey Interview on 20/20: "Left people in the room stunned"

This is a good point regardless of how you feel about Comey's interview. The normalizing of Trump threatening jail time against political foes and private citizens is incredibly dangerous to our judicial and constitutional norms.



Comey on Trump tweet suggesting he could face jail: ‘This is not normal. This is not OK’

James Comey said in a new interview that while most Americans shrugged off a tweet in which President Trump suggested the former FBI director suggesting he faces jail time, the president threatening a private citizen is "not normal."

In an interview with NPR, Comey warned Americans of what he says is the danger of letting Trump's more outlandish actions become normalized.

"President Trump, I don't follow him on Twitter but I get to see his tweets tweeted, I don't know how many, but some tweets this past couple of days that I should be in jail," Comey says. "The president of the United States just said that a private citizen should be jailed."

"I think the reaction of most of us was, 'meh, that's another one of those things.' This is not normal. This is not OK," Comey added.

Comey went on to say there is a "danger" to democracy in America if voters don't respond to Trump's "threats to the rule of law."

"There's a danger that we will become numb to it, and we will stop noticing the threats to our norms. The threats to the rule of law and the threats most of all to the truth," Comey said.

http://thehill.com/policy/national-...eet-suggesting-he-could-face-jail-this-is-not

The problem with this take is that the current administration has people who probably should go to jail. So when Democrats get into office and call for justice, Republicans will claim they’re doing the same thing.
 
Yep.


It’s like an old Andy Cap cartoon I recall where Andy tried to make a deal with Flo. He’d stop lying about her if she’d stop telling the truth about him.

Pubs, now with their great champion in the WH, have trafficked for so long in deceptive partisan hackery that lying is truly their natural language. Trump is the perfect Republican for this time. Think about that. Any remaining with any sense of honor and decency are constantly squirming, laying low, maybe occasionally timidly objecting, or running for an exit.
 
Interesting notes from Comey's book on Obama and Bush / Cheney:

 
Interesting notes from Comey's book on Obama and Bush / Cheney:


Of note for all the new anti-surveillance "libertarians," this tweets highlights that Dick Cheney and his team were the initiators of the post-911 domestic surveillance and FISA powers expansion, not some liberal big-government, deep-state conspirators.
 
It's clearer than ever that the entire Republican party is corrupt and running on baseless conspiracies and the need to use dirty tricks like baseless investigations and foreign interference to win elections.




And Comey is a pathetic weasel. It sickens me how weak people like this gain so much power in our government.




"The F.B.I. agents investigating Clinton’s use of a personal email account realized early on that they would never have a prosecutable case. While Clinton had violated laws pertaining to the handling of classified material, she had apparently done so out of a combination of technical ineptitude and convenience, and the government had never charged an offender without establishing nefarious motives. As a result, the bureau concluded it didn’t “have much on the intent side.”




You might think this decision made life easier for the F.B.I., which would be spared the ordeal of having to insert itself into a presidential campaign. Instead, it made life harder. The reason for this: The bureau contained what some Department of Justice officials considered “hotbeds of anti-Clinton hostility,” especially in the Little Rock and New York offices. Stewart describes how F.B.I. officials encouraged colleagues investigating the Democratic nominee with messages like “You have to get her” and “You guys are finally going to get that bitch.” James Comey, the F.B.I. director during the Clinton email probe, went so far as to tell Attorney General Loretta Lynch, “It’s clear to me that there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton.” Those agents leaked regularly to right-wing media sources that the bureau was turning a blind eye to what they saw as Clinton’s criminality.




This pressure drove Comey to make two fateful decisions. First, when he announced that the bureau was not bringing charges against Clinton, he denounced her “extremely careless” behavior, as a kind of middle course between what the law dictated and what Republicans demanded. Second, when an unrelated investigation into sex crimes by the former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner turned up more Clinton email 11 days before the election, Comey felt trapped into announcing that he had reopened the investigation.




Stewart shows how Comey violated the F.B.I.’s norm of doing everything possible to avoid involving itself in election campaigns, especially at the end. He believed that failing to intervene would lead conservative agents to leak the story — and would result in his own impeachment by the Republican Congress after the election. As a result, Comey told his staff he needed to publicly reopen the investigation lest he create “corrosive doubt that you had engineered a cover-up to protect a particular political candidate.”




This was a catastrophic violation of protocol — and probably a decisive one; as Stewart notes, the new email story led the news in six of the seven days in the final week before the election. But what drove Comey to this error was the refusal of Republicans in the bureau and Congress to accept and follow the rules. Stewart’s narrative shows Democrats still believed in institutions and norms — even after Comey’s extraordinary intervention against Clinton, he was still treated warmly by President Obama and cordially by Loretta Lynch. Comey felt bound to appease the Clinton-haters because they refused to accept any process that failed to yield their preferred outcome."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/books/review/deep-state-james-b-stewart.html
 
This is not my original thought, but more and more I have come to associate national-level Republicans with the small-time country club Republicans who populate the private schools and other elite local institutions I know. So many of them essentially live their lives with the ethos that rules apply to everyone but them. More to the point, they are the first ones to protest if someone else breaks a rule or is seen to be given lenient treatment, and to insist on strict law and order policies at their schools and in their neighborhoods - but as soon as it is themselves or their offspring who are in trouble, they believe their wealth and connections entitle them to special exceptions or lenient treatment. That kind of entitled attitude is now glaringly evident across the entire Republican ecosystem. And at the national level, a guy like Moscow Mitch has weaponized it - he knows that the Democrats are rule-followers and process people, and he has no compunctions about insisting they follow the rules while he breaks them at every turn.
 
Exactly. Democrats are largely made up of women, minorities, and people who worked their way up from low income backgrounds. They've been taught their whole lives to follow the rules and have been rewarded for doing so.
 
It's called being lawful evil.
 
Exactly. Democrats are largely made up of women, minorities, and people who worked their way up from low income backgrounds. They've been taught their whole lives to follow the rules and have been rewarded for doing so.

GettyImages-1371275-58b260025f9b586046dfdc4f.jpg
 
so much winning when your counterargument is a guy who has been dead for 10 years.

It's like when they keep bringing up Robert Byrd to try and counter arguments that the modern GOP is racist, bigoted, white supremacist, etc.
 
But what drove Comey to this error was the refusal of Republicans in the bureau and Congress to accept and follow the rules. Stewart’s narrative shows Democrats still believed in institutions and norms — even after Comey’s extraordinary intervention against Clinton, he was still treated warmly by President Obama and cordially by Loretta Lynch. Comey felt bound to appease the Clinton-haters because they refused to accept any process that failed to yield their preferred outcome."

Yep.
 
Back
Top