To Donald Bertelle:
Hope you’re feeling comfortable these days.
Okay. I’ve watched and read and heard plenty. This once eminently honorable man, whose ethics and righteousness were so effective for decades as head of the F.B.I, was rendered so drunk and unbalanced with the narcotic power of oversight of a herculean political combat being followed and highlighted in the flattering golden glow of an international spotlight, like so many charismatic figures in history when a rare, supremely dramatic opportunity presented itself to them, lost his composure.
His level and doctrinaire judgement, his Eagle Scout’s flame of righteousness flared up and enveloped him.
Lordy, this is exciting!
He violated the rules of his own playbook. In his fateful summer, he spoke out of turn about an ongoing investigation. He closed the investigation and declared it closed.
In his declaration, he violated another tenet in the F.B.I book of rules: he thrashed the subject, self-consciously presenting his condescending reprimands as if it pained him to do so, and concluded with an anticlimactic verdict of some “reckless” behavior and intimation of possible harm caused by it, but no grounds for prosecution. He was directed by his own rule book not to editorialize, but he did. His only statement should have been that after a thorough investigation of her emails he and his team had found no grounds for prosecution. End of news conference.
Skirting the edge of his Directorship precipice.
Finally, he went over the cliff. Fourteen days before the election, he sent a letter saying that he was reopening the investigation. He violated protocol. The letter could have waited. F.B.I tradition was clear, no new—especially no vague and unsubstantiated information—was ever revealed so near the day of a federal election. A well-known clear practice.
He wrote that he had new emails he had not seen before, and needed to pore through them for some possible new evidence. The emails in Uma Abedin’s emails revealed nothing new. BUT he wrote the letter to Congress before he know anything at all about what they showed. At best, precipitous. At worst, reckless.
Eleven days before the election he declared, “Oops, sorry. No harm, no foul.” But the damage was done.
Pity that he cannot face his stupendous error in judgement even now.
Tragic. It fits the literary definition. A tragic flaw. The little boy who was bullied, I just found out. The plot thins. I know there are more details in his background, traits and incidents that foreshadowed this leap over the edge into infamy.
The accounts of his interchanges with Scum may redeem his legacy. I wish him well. But I deeply regret his incompetence.
P.S. I’m perplexed by his reasoning that he thought he was deciding between disclosure and “hiding” what might be in the as yet unexamined emails on Abedin’s computer.
I’m disturbed by his not recognizing first, that there was no risk in withholding an announcement of said messages; even if there was new evidence in them, because he should not have been speaking publicly about a continuing investigation in the first place; and second, that it seemed not to occur to him that the public airing would likely damage Hillary’s chances; and thirdly: that he already regarded Scum as unfit for office (I’m sure) and he would be helping him win.
So…the worm in the wood of his psyche was probably the suppressed REPUBLICAN. You once said sneeringly that Obama had appointed a Republican and should have known that Comey would be apt to turn if any pressure arose.
I think Mueller in the same position (which of course he held before) would not have succumbed like that.
Comey’s weakness, after all, when his deepest character was challenged. And his cloaked inferiority complex. As an actor, I find his complex psyche very interesting. Personally, too. An egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I have described myself as that.
Hugs and Kisses,
DjT
P.P.S. The Lordy boy is now on a moral crusade. Won’t walk out from under the follow spot and out of the keylight (when being filmed, I’m always aware of the keylight; on the stage, as well)