James Comey Is Maxwell Smart
How Comey’s botched mission to safeguard a Hillary presidency elected Trump.
It’s far more likely that Mr. Comey conceived of his intervention as a counterintelligence operation. Hillary would win. Russia’s fake email about Ms. Lynch conspiring to prevent a Hillary indictment would become public and be used by Trump partisans and America’s adversaries to discredit her victory. Therefore he would neutralize this Russian threat by clearing Mrs. Clinton himself. In doing so, it now appears he accidentally secured Mr. Trump’s win.
Free yourself from any hindsight bias. All actors at the time were convinced Hillary would win; for U.S. officials, the urgency was to protect Mrs. Clinton’s inevitable presidency from Russian dirty tricks.
.. Mr. McAuliffe, in last month’s podcast, opined flatly that Russia also expected Mrs. Clinton to win and wanted to destabilize her presidency.
Mr. Comey himself, in public testimony, gave mumbly assent to the “intelligence community’s” now-claim that Russia wasn’t just trying to weaken Mrs. Clinton but elect Donald Trump, arguing that in a two-person race, hurting one necessarily helps the other.
Such sophistries aside, this is implausible. Against all polling, Russia would not have thought trying to elect Mr. Trump a good investment. In effect, this claim about Russian motives is another counterintelligence operation by our own intelligence community to distract from its botched counterintelligence operation that elected Mr. Trump.
To be clear, we’re not talking about a conspiracy exactly, but about intelligence leaders adjusting their statements and emphases on the fly to pretty up an embarrassing picture.
.. Hillary and her surrogates tirelessly flogged an apparent Trump-Putin affinity to her advantage. Mrs. Clinton’s mistake was devoting too many of her resources to the wrong states.
.. It’s useful to recall that what the FBI handed over to Special Counsel Robert Mueller was a “counterintelligence investigation”—an inquiry into the facts of Russia’s meddling, not a criminal investigation seeking something, anything to pin on Donald Trump.
If Mr. Mueller does not see the importance of coming clean on the Comey intervention (whether or not he wants to acknowledge that the Comey intervention may have elected Mr. Trump), then Mr. Mueller is part of the stonewall.