Pulling A James Comey

     Okay, so what do you call it when you do something you shouldn't have done, which leads to a terrible outcome that you hadn't at all planned on for yourself and others, after which you attempt to dodge judgement and put a halo around your own head by taking a strong righteous stand against the very evil you yourself enabled?
      If there wasn't a word for that before, there is now.

    It's called Pulling a James Comey.

    I just now coined the phrase, inspired by an Op-Ed piece in yesterday's New York Times by James Comey called "My Hope for the Mueller Report" in which Comey sanctimoniously informs us, the American public, that he is not rooting for Robert Mueller,

...special counsel for the investigation of Russian collusion in our 2016 Presidential election, 

...to either indict Donald Trump or clear his name, but wishes only for justice to be done, and admonishes us that it is up to us, "Americans of all stripes," to deliver a "resounding election result in 2020" to bring down Donald Trump, "a chronic liar who repeatedly attacks the rule of law."
      To which I reply, gimme a break, James Comey. You were the one who greatly helped Donald Trump get elected by your deliberate breach of FBI and Justice Department regulations to Trump's advantage during the 2016 Presidential election. 
       In the summer of 2016,

...after the Federal Bureau of Investigation had finished investigating whether there was any illegality in Hillary Clinton's use of her private email server for government business,

...it was James Comey's job as head of the FBI to turn over to the Justice Department all evidence gathered by his agency. It should then have been the job of the Attorney General's office to study the evidence and  adjudicate whether there was any suspicion of crime or culpability on Clinton's part.

       It should have been up to Attorney General Loretta Lynch to share with the public conclusions reached by the Justice Department.

       James Comey instead drew his own conclusions regarding Hillary Clinton's guilt, innocence or just sloppy email habits and called a press conference to blab his opinions. For that offense Comey should have been fired. And for that offense he was fired, but months later, ironically, by Donald Trump. Trump used Comey's breach of the rules ten months earlier in talking to the press about the Clinton investigation as an excuse to fire him, but only after Comey's position as head of the FBI no longer suited Trump's purposes.
       But far worse than James Comey's first violation of Justice Department rules to benefit Donald Trump was his second violation, ten days before the 2016 election, when he publicly announced that the Clinton email case was being re-opened because some emails she'd sent to her aide Huma Abedin had shown up on the computer of Abedin's scandal-ridden husband, Anthony Wiener.
        Nothing of importance was found among the emails and the case was closed a week later, three days before the election.  But the dropping of that 11th-hour bomb shell proved disastrous to Hillary Clinton.
        Now, it just so happens that while the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton's use of her private email server, the agency was also investigating Donald Trump's campaign for possible collusion with the Russian government. But the existence of this investigation James Comey chose not to share with the public prior to the election. He chose only to share the Clinton investigation, to the misfortune of Hillary Clinton and our country.
        James Comey has subsequently admitted that he handled the Clinton email investigation as he did because he was  sure that Hillary Clinton was going to win the 2016 Presidential election.

      After all, he already knew that Donald Trump was a chronic liar who repeatedly attacked the rule of law.

     And so James Comey chose to sensationalize the Clinton email investigation and hide the Trump Russian collusion investigation.
      That's not justice. That's hubris.  Which is also what Pulling a James Comey is.

References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/opinion/james-comey-mueller-report.html?pgtype=Homepage

https://www.factcheck.org/2017/06/timeline-russia-investigation/?fbclid=IwAR1ySRSXLBifBKyH7EbcvMsGjxBJIvqi6BvhQvYXNeHW0sx_UHw99sIhcZ8


https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/12/us/2016-presidential-election-investigation-fast-facts/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/us/politics/hillary-clinton-fbi-email-comey.html

http://time.com/4765460/james-comey-anthony-weiner-hillary-clinton-emails-huma-abedin/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-director-comey-congress-new-letter-hillary-clinton-emails-still-no-charges/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-director-james-comey-begins-testimony-to-congress/2017/05/03/9e3244bc-3006-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html?utm_term=.dcf1be7f5e3a

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/14/politics/comey-clinton-emails/index.html