James Comey Should Be Investigated For An Act Which Blatantly Favors His Own Republican Party

I am not buying the excuse being peddled for why James Comey released a letter which was of obvious political usefulness to Republicans - HIS PARTY - eleven days before an already red-hot election which every indication shows the Republican candidate was likely to lose and lose badly.  The people using the stupid decision of Bill Clinton to have a short meeting with the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, as cover for Comey over this are grasping at straws.   Yes, Bill Clinton should never have met with Loretta Lynch under the circumstances in place AND SHE SHOULD NOT HAVE AGREED TO MEET WITH HIM.   That was stupid on the part of those two.   Perhaps if Lynch had had someone running interference for her as Huma Abedin is documented to have run for Hillary Clinton the Attorney General wouldn't have met with him.

But just as Loretta Lynch should have known that the required propriety of her conduct in office not to mention common sense should have kept her from meeting with Bill Clinton, James Comey should certainly have known that the required propriety of his conduct in office should have kept him from doing a number of the things he's done this year.   It should certainly have told him that he should not send the letter he sent to the Republican hit men in congress who have pursued Hillary Clinton for obvious political purposes eleven days before an election.   JAMES COMEY HAS PLAINLY AND BLATANTLY INSERTED THE FBI INTO PARTISAN POLITICS, NOTHING ELSE ABOUT THIS CASE CAN MITIGATE HIS CHOICE TO DO THAT.   If Loretta Lynch was committing a highly problematic act in meeting with Bill Clinton, Comey has multiplied that by an enormous factor in what he did Friday.  

NPR, in one of its typical both-sides reports had an unnamed senior Department of Justice official putting it plainly.

"You don't hold press conferences to announce that someone should not be charged with a crime and then proceed to dump all over that person and to publicly discuss the evidence against them," he said. "That's kind of one of the 10 commandments for being a federal law enforcement officer. And another commandment would be — you don't publicly announce that you're conducting a criminal investigation against someone. And you especially don't do it if that person is a candidate, 11 days before an election. That's true whether it's a presidential election or an election for dog catcher."

James Comey should be investigated, any communications he had with Republicans in Congress and elsewhere are pertinent to deciding if his decision to become a political player was influenced by what they or other Republican officials said to him.   The decision to send the letter when he did was so damaging to our political system, our law enforcement system and was such a clearly wrong thing to do that reasonable people might speculate there must have either been some threat made or implied or some inducement given for him to do it. There are reasons that it is against explicit Department of Justice policy that James Comey is covered by, policy that he obviously and explicitly broke in an act that favors his own political party.   If anything like that was said to him it must now be made public.   With his decision, as the head of the FBI, to insert himself into a presidential election must get at least as full and as public scrutiny as that which Hillary Clinton has been subjected to on a far lesser and far more speculative range of possible, though we now know, improbable wrongs.   James Comey should be suspended from office pending that investigation, his action was so irresponsible and wrong that if he had any judgement he would offer to do that and he, as a law enforcement official, should willingly cooperate with an investigation of what he clearly did.  

I have never thought it was a good idea for Barack Obama to appoint Republicans to high positions, it certainly has proved to have been a bad idea in Comey's case.   His conduct this year has been bad enough that he should be fired but his conduct last Friday is so bad that it must be fully revealed so his reasons for doing so are known.  One of the reasons I can think for him to have released the letter on Friday was that it is virtually impossible for that to happen to inform voters  before the election on whether or not he corruptly did the bidding of his fellow Republicans as the head of the FBI.   I don't think it is wrong to raise that possibility as a serious issue in the remaining days of the campaign.