The James Comey Morality Play

I’ve been no fan of James Comey.  I think there is little doubt that without his Hillary Clinton email letter of October 28, 2016, we would not now be in the position we find ourselves, with a president under siege, so far out of his depth that he’d need a periscope just to glimpse the surface.  From the moment that news hit the wires, I thought that Comey was part of some grand alt-right Koch-fueled conspiracy designed to put a final nail in the floundering campaign of Hillary Clinton.  It did in fact seal Hillary’s fate, but I no longer believe that Comey was part of a conspiracy.  If anything, he may have been the victim of a conspiracy.

I watched Comey give his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.  He was open, sincere, and earnest.  He radiates integrity and honesty. He’s a patriot who lives by a code…exactly the sort of individual you’d want at the head of the nation’s premiere crime-fighting organization.  The man’s a Boy Scout.  So I don’t think Comey was trying to torpedo Hillary Clinton when he announced in October that he’d discovered a new cache of emails on her aide’s server that the FBI needed to review. I think that he knew what kind of devastating effect the announcement might have, and I think he probably went through a gut-wrenching internal debate about making the new emails public, but he genuinely believed that it was the sort of information the American people had the right to know before they decided on their vote for president.

I think that in the last four months James Comey has had an epiphany.  He has realized that it was his choice and his actions, however honest and well-intentioned, that placed Donald Trump in the Oval Office.  Comey has had the opportunity, better than perhaps any American, up close and personal, to see what kind of horror he has wrought.  He’s had to suffer Donald Trump invading his personal space, breathing into his ear with entreaties demanding loyalty.  He’s been subjected to a scene right out of “The Godfather”, where our orange-complected Vito Corleone issued his marching orders with built-in plausible deniability: “Jimmy boy, we’re both men of the world, we understand each other.  I hope this little Mike Flynn thing can go away.  Capiche?”  He’s personally seen Trump say one thing in private and then the complete opposite in public, and he’s suffered the petty wrath of the most thin-skinned leader to ever sit behind the English oak of the Resolute desk. So, at the end of the day, what I think James Comey feels most strongly in the pit of his gut is guilt, guilt that his letter was the fuse that led to Hillary Clinton’s explosive decline, guilt that his own honesty and integrity and loyalty to the FBI installed an ignorant incompetent malevolent Russian puppet in the most powerful seat on the planet.

Now Comey is doing what he can to correct his own mistake.  He’s paying penance and accumulating karma.  When Comey shared his memo detailing that Godfather encounter above and encouraging his friend to release it to the press, it wasn’t about revenge or glory or protecting himself.  It was about balancing the scales.  He can’t use a time machine to return to October 28 and not release the Hillary Clinton letter, but he can do everything within his power to stop the out-of-control rolling train-wreck that is the Trump presidency. I applaud him for that.