Tag Archives: james-comey

Obstruction of Justice Getting Closer All the Time

by BrandonBelue Posted on May 11, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has now admitted on national TV that he directly asked James Comey three times if he was under investigation. I will allow my attorney pal bmaz to comment:

I failed to take bmaz seriously enough when he told me that James Comey’s July 5 press conference about the Hillary Clinton investigation was way out of bounds, and it’s time to make up for that. The president of the United States cannot call the director of the FBI and ask if he is under investigation, especially when the threat of firing the FBI director is obviously hanging in the air. This is indeed fucking bananas.

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Obstruction of Justice Getting Closer All the Time

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2016 Was Not a Tight Race

by AlmaTillyard6 Posted on April 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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I suppose this is hopeless, but I want to try one more time on the Comey thing. The most common response to the suggestion that James Comey’s letter was the turning point in the 2016 campaign is this:

In a race this close, lots of things could have tipped the result. The Comey letter is just one of many.

But this isn’t true. Take a look at 538’s polling numbers in the final two weeks of the campaign:

On the day before Comey sent his letter, Hillary Clinton had a 6-point lead. There is no ordinary campaign event that plausibly could have turned that into a loss. Not dumb ad buys. Not bad internal polling. Not bad speeches by the candidate. Nothing. It’s just too big a lead.

The Comey letter was a bolt from the blue and it cost Clinton three percentage points. This is the only thing that made the race close to begin with. Once Clinton’s lead had been cut by three points, then an extra point of support for Trump in the last couple of days—which 538 and others missed—was just enough for Trump to eke out a 2-point popular vote loss and a miracle Electoral College victory.

That wouldn’t have mattered without the Comey letter. None of those little things that everyone keeps pointing to would have produced a Trump win. It’s true that in a tight race lots of things can make the difference between winning and losing, but it wasn’t a tight race. Not until James Comey sent out that letter, anyway.

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2016 Was Not a Tight Race

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The Lesson of 2016: Rabid Congressional Investigations Work

by EdwinRKZmcqbanlt Posted on December 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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So what did we learn this year? That America is more susceptible to authoritarian populism than we thought? Not really. Trump’s victory was a fluke, driven by Russian hacking, James Comey, and some bad polls in a few states.

That racism is on the rise? There’s really no evidence of that.

That Democrats need to pay more attention to the white working class? Maybe, but no matter how many times people say otherwise, that really wasn’t a root cause of Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

I could go on, but instead I want to suggest something the 2016 election does teach us: persistent, obsessive investigations pay off. In the 90s, Republicans started investigating Whitewater. Even Ken Starr knew there was nothing to this after a couple of years, but he was put under pressure to keep at it, and eventually he hit some fluke paydirt: Monica Lewinsky. This had nothing to do with Whitewater, but who cares? Scandal is scandal, and it rubbed off enough on Al Gore that Republicans took back the presidency in 2000.

Fast forward to 2012. Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong related to Benghazi. That was clear pretty quickly, but Republicans kept at it. I laughed at them at the time, but they had the last laugh when they once again hit a fluke bit of paydirt: Clinton’s private email server. Clinton didn’t really do anything seriously wrong here either, but it didn’t matter. Republicans kept at it for the next year and a half, and that was enough to convince a lot of people that Clinton was, somehow, corrupt and untrustworthy. That allowed Republicans to retake the presidency.

There was lots of other stuff going on too, but this is now twice that maniacal dedication to an investigation has paid off for Republicans. It’s basically a way of hacking the media, which feels like it has no choice but to cover congressional investigations on a daily basis. It’s news, after all, no matter how you define news.

So that’s a lesson for sure. I’m just not sure what the solution is.

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The Lesson of 2016: Rabid Congressional Investigations Work

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FBI Director Delivers Powerful Call for Change in Police Race Relations

by JamisonAnthony Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

In a rare and candid speech on Thursday, FBI director James Comey urged police officers to begin engaging in honest conversations about broken race relations in America, saying it was time for officers to stop resorting to “lazy mental shortcuts” that have too often lead to the mistreatment of minorities.

“Those of us in law enforcement must re-double our efforts to resist bias and prejudice,” Comey said in an address to Georgetown University. “We must better understand the people we serve and protect—by trying to know, deep in our gut, what it feels like to be a law-abiding young black man walking on the street and encountering law enforcement. We must understand how that young man may see us.”

The speech follows the high-profile police killings of two unarmed black men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the widespread anger expressed over the lack of grand jury indictments against the officers in both deaths. The fatal shootings sparked massive protests across the country, with demonstrators demanding for police reform.

On Thursday, Comey referred to both Brown and Garner, along with the two NYPD officers who were shot execution-style in their patrol car in December. Calling their deaths a “crossroads,” Comey said it was time for law enforcement agencies to acknowledge that a large portion of police history “is not pretty” and rife with instances of persisting, unconscious prejudices.

Comey’s rationale aligns with psychological studies indicating that even in the absence of overt racist views, individuals–particularly police officers–often act with bias, especially in instance where a split-second decision is required.

“If we can’t help our latent biases, we can help our behavior in response to those instinctive reactions, which is why we work to design systems and processes that overcome that very human part of us all,” he said. “Although the research may be unsettling, what we do next is what matters most.”

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FBI Director Delivers Powerful Call for Change in Police Race Relations

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