— by Polydamas
Ecclesiastes 1:9 is correct. There really is no new thing under the sun.
Like Hollywood, the Washington, D.C. Beltway constantly mines past blockbusters for new remakes and sequels by re-purposing old, tried-and-true scripts. For the past four decades, the leftist Washington Beltway has been obsessed with the Watergate script. Everything political is viewed by leftist denizens of the Beltway through the singular lens of the Watergate script. This is because the left loves the happy ending of the Watergate movie, the 1973 toppling from office of Republican President Richard Milhaus Nixon. Even on the state and local levels, leftists adore Watergate, continuously using it to gleefully depose Republican governors and mayors.
Like a toddler, who is inclined to view every one of his toys as a hammer to pound other toys, leftists deem any mishap as a scandal and every scandal as the same or worse than venerated Watergate. They portray every single mishap that may have occurred on the watch of a Republican president as having been personally and evilly committed by him or at his explicit direction. They elevate every so-called misdeed to the level of impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors”, as defined in the Constitution, in order to trigger their favored impeachment scenario.
Every aspiring journalist, who studied journalism at the knees of revered leftist professors, imagines himself or herself as, one day, being the rightful heir to legendary Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who brought down the dastardly Republican President Richard Nixon. When any leftist journalist suspects that he or she can somehow link a sitting Republican president with any mishap on his watch by “six degrees of separation” or less, every one of them is driven into a lust for journalistic immortality and will accept nothing short of the scalp of the Republican president.
Any mishap, no matter how large or small, will find its way into the front pages of ever-dwindling newspapers, the blaring headlines of the infotainment industry’s websites, the television news, and the lips of pundits everywhere. They will portray any purported misdeed in the most sensational terms imaginable, imputing the most sinister conceivable motives. They will inevitably pepper any discussion with shopworn Watergate phrases, such as “what did the President know and when did he know it?” and “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up”.
The shrieking crescendo of leftist demands for a special prosecutor (also known as an independent counsel) will inevitably reach an intolerable peak that an easily-cowed Republican Attorney General will timidly appease the howling mob by appointing a special prosecutor and giving him an unlimited budget. Once events reach this point, the game is lost to the Republican administration because of the overwhelming institutional incentives for the special prosecutor to find someone to play the criminal and to hang some crime — any crime whatsoever including the non-crime of lack of forthrightly volunteering unsolicited information on all topics — around his neck.
A special prosecutor is always clever and devious enough to find a criminal suitable for lynching to appease the Cannibals of the Beltway. He is well aware that they consider him to be an expert-level headhunter and believe that only an incompetent or corrupt special prosecutor would return from the hunt empty-handed. He knows well that the bloodthirsty mob will throw the mother of all temper tantrum and will shriek even louder “Cover-Up!”, “Conspiracy!”, and “Incompetence!” unless the special prosecutor presents it with the bloody pacifier of a scalp or two. When faced with Hobson’s Choice, giving the howling mob the head of the fattest sacrificial animal he can find or his own head, he will unerringly choose to preserve his own head.
Also, the special prosecutor will always be mindful that he is a part of America’s political history. He is walking in the footsteps of prior special prosecutors and must discover wrongdoing to affix himself in the immortal pantheon of special prosecutors. He will always be compelled to justify the pages devoted to him in future history books as well as the munificent budget consumed and the years of human resources invested in the endeavor.
Now that the special prosecutor game has been lost from the get go, all that is left for Republicans is to manage the inevitable carnage. Ambitious Republican senators will be seduced by the infotainment industry’s sirens to throw their fellows under the bus to ingratiate themselves. To advance themselves, some of them will grandstand while the video cameras are rolling and call upon the president to part company with his head “for the good of the Republican Party”. One of the prime candidates here will be Arizona’s Republican Senator John McCain, who has never missed an opportunity in the past three decades to side with the howling lynch mob against the Republican president.
It should be noted here that Democrat presidents almost never appoint special prosecutors to investigate themselves. Unlike Republicans, they are not stupid; they know that a special prosecutor will always find himself a sacrificial animal. Moreover, everyone in Washington knows that special prosecutors are a mighty weapon that only the left is allowed to employ to bludgeon Republicans, not vice versa.
Former President Barack Hussein Obama shrewdly refused to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate his own Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice’s involvement in the gun running fiasco known as “Fast and Furious”. There, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives facilitated the smuggling of firearms to Mexican drug cartels to foment chaos and bloodshed in Mexico and along the southern border as the linchpin for abolishing the Second Amendment here.
Former President Obama knew all too well how the Washington blame game is played, which is why he deviously refused to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the clandestine efforts of the Internal Revenue Service and Lois Lerner. She and her underlings illegally suppressed with impunity the political speech of conservative and libertarian groups, which are guaranteed to them by the First Amendment and by the United States Supreme Court case of Citizens United. He also resisted calls to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya and the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens. He further wolfishly declined to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s use of a secret private e-mail server to avoid public scrutiny of her scheme to collect stupendous “pay for play” bribes for her William, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation in return for granting valuable government favors to the highest bidders.
Now, where does former Federal Bureau of Investigations Director James Comey fit into this choreographed Kabuki impeachment theater morality play? Let us first consider the FBI to be a three-legged stool.
One of its three legs — and, by far, the most publicly-acclaimed, is the “Federales,” its intrepid agents and professionals. They are personified by the legendary FBI agent Eliot Ness ,who brought down notorious Chicago mobster Al Capone. These are professional people, who honestly work for what many Americans still consider to be the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, and they mostly do what they are supposed to do.
The second leg of the FBI’s stool is “Blackmail”, personified by its first director J. Edgar Hoover. From 1924 and until his death in 1972, Hoover served Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. Hoover’s longevity in office can be best explained by President Lyndon Johnson’s quote in the October 31, 1971 edition of The New York Times that “It’s probably better to have him [Hoover] inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in”. Hoover made himself indispensable to Washington because even people as powerful as his presidents could not fire him from his position for fear that he would reveal the extensive blackmail that he had on them.
During his five decades in Washington, Hoover had amassed mountains of blackmail material on American presidents, Senators, Congress Representatives, judges, politicians, civil rights activists, movie stars, business people, and just about everyone from all walks of life. Plain-spoken President Harry S. Truman was quoted “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. The FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex life scandals and plain blackmail when they should be catching criminals”.
The same sentiment was echoed by Jack Anderson of The Washington Post, who wrote in a 1972 expose:
“FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, the curmudgeon of law enforcement, fiercely resisted a White House suggestion that he spare a few hundred agents to crack down on drug abuses. But he can spare agents to snoop into the sex habits, business affairs, and political pursuits of individuals who aren’t even remotely involved in illegal activity.
“Hoover’s gumshoes have loaded FBI files with titillating tidbits about such diverse figures as movie actors Marlon Brando and Harry Belafonte, football heroes Joe Namath and Lance Retzel, ex-boxing champs Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali, black leaders, Ralph Abernathy and Roy Innis.
“Hoover’s gumshoes go out of their way to find out who’s sleeping with whom in Washington and Hollywood. A famous movie star has been the subject of investigation, even though he has no criminal record or fingerprint data. His FBI file contains nothing but rumors about his sex life, showing that he is definitely a homosexual”.
According to Curt Gentry, who wrote J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, Hoover’s blackmail material included information
“on the patriarch of an American political dynasty, his sons, their wives, and other women; allegations of two homosexual arrests which Hoover leaked to help defeat a witty, urbane Democratic presidential candidate; the surveillance reports on one of America’s best-known first ladies and her alleged lovers, both male and female, white and black; the child molestation documentation the director used to control and manipulate one of the Red-baiting proteges; a list of the Bureau’s spies in the White House during the eight administrations when Hoover was FBI director; the forbidden fruit of hundreds of illegal wiretaps and bugs, containing, for example, evidence that an attorney general, Tom C. Clark, who later became Supreme Court justice, had received payoffs from the Chicago syndicate; as well as celebrity files, with all the unsavory gossip Hoover could amass on some of the biggest names in show business.”
When Hoover died on May 2, 1972, Washington, D.C. breathed an enormous sigh of relief and jubilation on removing Hoover’s heavy yoke from its neck. According to Darwin Porter’s book J. Edgar Hoover & Clyde Tolson: Investigating the Sexual Secrets of America’s Most Famous Men and Women, President Richard Nixon dispatched 18 of his secret service men to Hoover’s home to retrieve the files that Hoover kept in his basement. “Get them before Clyde Tolson shreds them”. However, Hoover’s secretary Helen Gandy, who had worked for Hoover for 51 years, and Assistant FBI Director Clyde Tolson had already started the process of destroying Hoover’s blackmail material. Gandy and Tolson had been instructed by Hoover to shred and burn Hoover’s blackmail material lest it fall into the hands of people of whom Hoover did not approve, not only Nixon.
The third leg of the FBI’s three-legged stool is “Informant”, personified by William Mark Felt, the FBI’s Associate Director from the day after Hoover died until his retirement in June of 1973. Felt was the legendary informant, whose nickname was “Deep Throat”, who met with reporters in underground garages and fed damaging information about the Watergate caper to The Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Whereas Hoover ruled Washington by accumulating blackmail material and threatening to expose the victims to scorn and public humiliation if they did not do his bidding, Felt and subsequent high-ranking government officials leaked damaging information to the press to achieve their personal agendas and ambitions. Their objectives are not strictly honorable ones to educate the public on matters of national importance, but the leaks are intended to accomplish their strategic and tactical goals, including regime change.
Before he was appointed FBI Director in September of 2013, James Comey was an attorney, a Department of Justice prosecutor. He was never an FBI agent, did not train at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and did not rise through the ranks of the organization. Thus, he could never have credibly auditioned for the role of an FBI gumshoe like Eliot Ness.
Instead, James Comey was always a cunning political animal, which served him well with the insiders of the Washington, D.C. establishment. Although for many years, he nominally registered to vote as a Republican, he knew exactly how to play the inside game and how to ingratiate himself particularly with Democrats and their donor class, who truly run the federal government. When James
When the FBI was tasked with investigating Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of her homebrew e-mail server to secretly trade special dispensations from the State Department in return for sizable donations to the Clinton Foundation, Comey tore a page from J. Edgar Hoover’s play book, Comey could not be happier.
With the technological marvels of the 21st century and the prowess of the federal government’s electronic signals interception capability, Comey collected blackmail material on Hillary Clinton and her inner circle that would make J. Edgar Hoover proud. Comey figured, as did most denizens of the Washington Beltway, that Hillary Clinton would be the next president of the United States. To assure himself continued employment as FBI Director in the second Clinton administration and her gratitude, he decided to give Hillary Clinton her “Get Out of Jail Free” Monopoly card and declined to prosecute her for her e-mails’ clear transgressions of federal criminal law. He knew exactly how to play the insider game, counted on Hillary Clinton’s future cooperation with his agendas, and squirreled away all the many nuggets of blackmailable information that he gleaned from the Clinton e-mails and from FBI investigations, just like J. Edgar Hoover would do.
In late October of 2016, just a few weeks before the presidential election, Comey came to realize, based upon his access to detailed intelligence information and communication intercepts, that true public sentiment was such that Hillary Clinton would be defeated in her quest for the White House. He decided to hedge his bets by briefly re-opening and quickly re-closing the FBI’s Hillary Clinton investigation, hoping to curry favor with Donald Trump and Republicans. His excuse was based upon the exceedingly flimsy grounds that Clinton’s assistant Huma Abedin’s laptop may have contained previously undisclosed e-mails and that he had a duty to supplement his prior report to Congress.
When Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States, Comey was all too happy to capitalize on the unfounded rumors of Trump’s fantastical collusion conspiracy with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to stealthily steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Comey personally assured Trump in private that the latter was not the target of the investigation, but refused to publicly clear Trump and relieve the mounting pressure. Comey refused to clear Trump because he did not want to throw away useful blackmail that could serve as a major bargaining chip in his dealings with both the President and with the Beltway Deep State. For as long as the Damocles sword of federal investigation continued to hang over Trump, Comey believed that he could exercise power over Trump. At the same time, he also assured the establishment insiders that he could control Trump and prevent him from “draining the swamp” that supplied the lifeblood to the Deep State.
Comey happily reveled in his J. Edgar Hoover powers as kingmaker. However, not content to just play J. Edgar Hoover’s role in the Kabuki theater’s production of Donald Trump’s impeachment morality play, Comey opted to also play Mark Felt’s role as the infotainment industry’s leaker. Through intermediaries, he fed the Trump-hating media juicy tidbits of damaging and embarrassing information, some correct but mostly incorrect, in order to prolong the investigation and maintain the dark cloud over the Trump administration. He also slow-walked Trump’s directive to discover the identities and clamp down on the government leakers because he really liked his alter ego role of the idealistic Mark Felt and did not want to arrest himself. Comey’s dual role was intended by Comey to further ensnare Trump in the sticky web of the Russia caper, maintain the scandal for years, and personally profit from the dynamic between Trump and the Deep State, while slyly placing the bit in Trump’s mouth and the reins in Comey’s hands.
Comey believed that his lofty position as FBI Director in the midst of the Russia scandal investigation immunized him and bought him the ultimate job security in Washington. Little did he realize that Trump was quickly losing patience with him and that Trump would never consent to be a well-disciplined horse controlled by Comey’s heels and reins. Comey received the surprise of his life when Trump unceremoniously bucked and unseated him from the saddle, with Trump apparently oblivious to the time-honored lessons of the Watergate movie that a president could not fire Department of Justice officers in the midst of an investigation.
James Comey’s disastrous Senate hearing on June 8, 2017 revealed to all but the most leftist partisan Americans the irreconcilable two-faced nature of the former FBI Director. He auditioned all over Washington, D.C, for the dual roles of Edgar Mark Comey. He alternated between calculating and idealistic, sophisticated and folksy, powerful and lacking in courage, controlling and timid victim, simultaneously running with the fox and giving chase with the baying hounds. In the end, he failed miserably in his audition for both roles.