Comey’s fizzle

Rich Lowry:

James Comey has an expectations problem.

By any reasonable standard, his testimony about his service under President Donald Trump and his cashiering would be damaging perhaps to the point of debilitating. But his account has been billed as Watergate and the Clinton impeachment rolled into one, another step toward Trump getting permanently helicoptered out of the White House in a Nixonian tableau, and by this unreasonable standard, Comey looks to be a fizzle.

Judging only by his statement for the record provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee (perhaps the live testimony will play differently), Comey doesn’t have Trump nailed for high crimes and misdemeanors. Rather, he has him dead to rights for amateurish and ham-handed scheming, which is not an impeachable offense.

The document has considerable entertainment value in its dead-pan account of a profound mismatch, a Washington buddy movie gone bad. It’s a tale of a bureaucratically agile and self-serving careerist matched against an institutionally ignorant and self-serving outsider. One is careful, memorializing every conversation and calculating his every more; the other is blundering around in the dark — and eventually blows the whole thing up.

The narrative that Democrats want to believe is that Trump is in so deep with the Russians that he took the incredible risk of firing his FBI director to cover his tracks. The picture in the Comey memo is instead of a president driven mad by the investigation, in particular by his inability to get the FBI director to say publicly that he isn’t under investigation — when, in fact, he isn’t under investigation.

It’s impossible to know anything for certain without all of the underlying facts of the Russia controversy, but the Comey statement tends to support the idea that Trump was acting out of sense of wronged innocence, rather than of one-step-ahead-of-the-law guilt.

Perhaps the biggest revelation in the statement (much of which had already been leaked) is that Trump was correct when he said in his missive firing Comey that the FBI director had told him no less than three times that he wasn’t under investigation. What are the odds?

Amazingly enough, according to Comey, the director repeatedly told Trump he wasn’t under investigation without the president even asking him. Obsessed with the “cloud” the Russia probe had created, Trump became desperate to get this fact out in the public and badgered Comey about it, to no avail.

Here, once again, Comey’s subjective standard for talking publicly became a highly politicized flash point. Comey said the Hillary Clinton investigation was closed, open, and closed during the campaign. A couple of months ago, he told a congressional committee that a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign was ongoing. Comey talks — a lot.

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