As all of official Washington waits breathlessly for former FBI Director James Comey’s appearance Thursday morning before the Senate Intelligence Committee, I have one simple thought: At last, it’s time for Comey and his current supporters to put up or shut up.
I say “current supporters” because feelings about Comey, clearly, have less to do with one’s views of the man himself than with whose ox he is perceived to be ready to gore.
Last summer, after Comey announced that the FBI would not recommend a prosecution of Hillary Clinton for what he termed her “reckless” handling of classified information, he was feted by Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media; in late October, when he announced new leads would require further investigation just 11 days before the election, his Democrat supporters turned on him.
{mosads}Those criticisms morphed during November and December into growing demands for his ouster, with then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid calling on Comey to resign, current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying he had “lost confidence” in Comey, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi saying “maybe he’s not in the right job.”
Then President Trump fired Comey, and, presto-change-o, he was lionized as a martyr by the very same people who had been calling for his head.
I’m tired of it, and the millions of Americans who voted to send Donald Trump to the White House to drain the swamp are tired of it. Many of them see this whole “Russia thing” as nothing more than the Washington establishment’s attempt to do to Trump – and to them – what they could not succeed in doing at the ballot box.
First, in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory, the establishment and its allies in the mainstream media began talking darkly about possible “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to defeat Clinton. They pointed fingers, they cast blame, they showed outrage, they did everything they could to argue that Clinton lost only because the Trump campaign – and possibly Trump himself – actively worked with the Russian government to sabotage the Clinton campaign.
But even after months of leaks of classified intelligence, Mark Warner – the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee – is forced to acknowledge, as he did last Sunday, that, “there is no smoking gun.” And we can take that as definitive – does anyone doubt, at this point, that if there were evidence of collusion, it would not have been leaked?
So they backed off the collusion angle, and instead switched focus to the “obstruction of justice” angle – as in, President Trump obstructed justice by telling Comey to shut down the FBI’s investigation into the alleged collusion, as evidenced by Comey’s reported notes of the president urging him to “let go” of the investigation into fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
But now, in advance of the Thursday hearing, ABC News has reported that Comey plans to testify that he did not believe the president was corruptly attempting to impede the FBI’s investigation into matters Russian. (How could he make that argument, anyway, given that any attempt to do so would immediately be followed by questioning demanding to know why, if Comey believed the president was actually obstructing justice, did he fail to report it to his superiors at the time, as the law requires?)
Wait – what? If we already know that Comey’s much-hyped testimony Thursday will not advance the argument that the president tried to obstruct justice, then what is the point of all the hype?
So … put up, or shut up. Show us the evidence of collusion, or the evidence of obstruction of justice, or shut up and let the rest of us go back to advancing the agenda for which the American people voted when they chose to send President Trump to the White House.
Jenny Beth Martin is President and co-founder of Tea Party Patriots.
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