Comey deserved to be fired for manifestly abusing his power at the FBI

Comey has been playing fast and loose with his powers as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, making it entirely appropriate for Trump to fire him.

James ComeyJames Comey deserved the boot and I’m only sorry that he did not get fired on Trump’s first day in office. Despite being the top law enforcement officer in the land, Comey played fast and loose with every precept of law enforcement. He handed out immunity like candy, destroyed evidence, failed properly to question witnesses (including Hillary), and then did his bizarre dog-and-pony show on July 5, 2016, in which he laid out facts manifestly indicting Hillary, only to effectively usurp the Attorney General’s power by announcing that everything Hillary had done did not amount to an indictable offense.

Having set the bar so low, Comey sank even lower when he did nothing about the corrupt Loretta Lynch-Bill Clinton airplane meeting, re-opened the whole Hillary matter days before the election, and then closed the whole Hillary matter days before the election. Lately, Comey has been playing the drama queen before Congress, including the drama queen’s habit of exaggeration, which resulted in his claim that Huma had loaded her sex-predator husband’s laptop with hundreds of thousands of documents. I have wondered in the last couple of days if we’ve been watching Comey’s slo-mo psychotic break play out on live TV.

The most scathing indictment of all regarding Comey came from Tucker Carlson:

Pay attention to the damning language at the end of Carlson’s riff:

Just how powerful was James Comey? Let’s put it this way: He was feared in a way that no appointed bureaucrat should ever be feared in a free society. Time and again, elected lawmakers on both sides came on this show and expressed worry and concern about his behavior. But they did so only during commercial breaks with the camera off. Why? Because they were terrified of the prospect of criticizing him in public. They certainly don’t have that fear the sitting President of the United States and that tells you everything you need to know about Jim Comey.

It was not Comey’s job to thread the political needle. It’s never been his job to thread the political needle. His job, always, has been to conduct clean, honest investigations into such things as Hillary’s national security violations (which Comey himself established she committed, despite a shoddy investigation) and the allegations regarding Trump’s Russian contacts (which, to date, are proving to be a whole lot of nothing). Everything else he did was gratuitous and improper.

What Comey revealed himself to be was a 6’8″ tall tube of ego and hubris. The Russian investigation will continue, because Trump’s got nothing to hide, and the Democrat kerfuffle and furor will go away in a matter of days when Trump does something else to trigger their horror antennae.

Meanwhile, the Comey affair has generated a vast number of amusing and smart tweets, a few of which I’ve gathered here: