Before FBI Director James Comey was fired on Tuesday, there weren’t many politicians on either side of the aisle who were pleased with him or would have been sorry to see him go. Hillary Clinton recently blamed him for her defeat in last year’s presidential election by having re-opened the investigation into her mishandling of classified material less than two weeks before the election. Comey had confirmed in March that the FBI was investigating connections between advisors to President Donald Trump and representatives of the Russian government, both prior to the election last year and in the period between the election and the inauguration in January.

But as soon as the bombshell announcement was made late Tuesday afternoon, the Democrats and their allies in the media had found their latest “Watergate” scandal. Trump’s firing of Comey was compared to Watergate’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” Trump was said to be Nixonian because, they argue, he is attempting to shut down Comey’s investigation into his supposed collusion with the Russians.

Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General who was confirmed by a 96 to 4 vote in the Senate on April 25, wrote the letter recommending that Comey should be fired: “The Director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution. It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement,” wrote Rosenstein.

CNN’s Erin Burnett was obviously confused when discussing Rosenstein’s rationale. She said, laughingly and in disbelief, that candidate Trump had “praised Comey for that decision.” But what Trump actually said about it on July 5, shortly after Comey’s announcement, was that “Today is the best evidence ever that we’ve seen that our system is absolutely, totally rigged. It’s rigged.” Clearly Burnett was thinking about Trump’s praise for Comey after he re-opened the investigation into Hillary’s emails just 11 days before the election.

The fix was clearly in for the investigation into Hillary’s email scandal, which was a genuine national security scandal. Following the revelation that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had met with Bill Clinton in a plane at the Phoenix airport, she refused to recuse herself from the case, instead saying that she would follow the recommendation of Comey. Comey then interviewed Hillary for about three hours, and just a few days later, without comparing her answers to previous statements she had made on the record, such as during her testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, he let her off the hook. Comey laid out the case for Hillary’s indictment, but concluded that no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute the case.

Calls for an independent counsel or commission to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia are a misguided distraction from two much more relevant investigations: President Barack Obama’s attempts to undermine the Trump candidacy—and now the Trump presidency—as well as actual, well-documented financial and business ties between the Russians and the Clintons, including Hillary’s campaign manager John Podesta.

A recent, lengthy feature by The New York Times attempts a postmortem on the U.S. 2016 presidential election. The Times’ editorializing about the election is based on innuendo and false reporting. The Times reporters write that the alleged Russian influence on the election, tilting it in favor of Donald Trump, was a bigger story than Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. This might be, at best, considered a matter of opinion. But at worst it is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper might have a clear view of what the Russians have, or have not, done. He “admitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee…that the Russians did not alter vote counts in the U.S. election,” reported CNS News. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) asked Clapper to confirm that he had seen “no evidence that vote tallies were altered or manipulated in anyway?” to which Clapper replied, “That’s correct.” Clapper also told Senator John McCain (R-AZ) that “We had no way of gauging the impact that—certainly the intelligence community cannot gauge the impact—it [Russian cyber activities] had on the choices the electorate made.”

In other words, it is impossible to parse the effect that Russian activities had on votes, but possible to verify that the Russians did not alter the vote tallies. After nearly a year investigating supposed Russian collusion with Trump to help him win the election, there is no supporting evidence.

Clapper confirmed again this week that he has seen “no evidence” of collusion between Trump associates and Russian officials or foreign nationals.

By touting the influence of a foreign nation on our domestic politics, the press, and the Times in particular, are attempting to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, while at the same time keeping a cloud of suspicion over the presidency of Donald Trump. The Times is clear about absolving Hillary. It states, “They knew it would not be enough to prove that Mrs. Clinton was sloppy or careless. To bring charges, they needed evidence that she knowingly received classified information or set up her server for that purpose.”

This is blatantly false. Mrs. Clinton could have been pursued under charges of gross negligence. As former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy notes, “‘malicious intent’ is not required to prove felonious mishandling of classified information.” Comey did say that Clinton was extremely careless. But the Democrats and the media think they finally have their weapon to defeat Trump. Meanwhile, though the Republicans still control all Senate and House committees, they still lack the will, or the vision, to set the agenda and shape the narrative.

Roger Aronoff

Nobody does it better than President Donald Trump. That is, drive the media crazy. And The Washington Post has gone nuts in reacting to the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

Remember that Comey botched the Hillary email and Trump/Russia investigations, using in the latter the discredited “Trump Dossier” of gossip that the anti-Trump intelligence community couldn’t even verify.

Comey was in over his head, as we demonstrated in part one of our series, “The final Truth about the Trump Dossier.” He had to resign or be fired.

In addition, Trump blew the whistle on the Russia probe, noting in his firing letter that Comey confirmed that Trump was NOT under investigation. Trump said “…I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation…”

Nevertheless, the Post is convinced that the firing means that Trump is guilty as hell and has dug his own political grave. Look at the headlines from Wednesday’s “Post Most” list of “popular” columns:

• Firing FBI director Comey is already backfiring on Trump. It’s only going to get worse.
• After Trump fired Comey, White House staff scrambled to explain why
• John McCain on Comey firing: ‘There will be more shoes to drop’
• In the wake of Trump’s brazen firing of Comey, it’s time to go nuclear. Here’s how.
• Jeffrey Toobin went ballistic about Trump and Comey. It was great TV.
• If Trump fired Comey over Russia, he must go
• The Comey debacle only magnifies the Russia mystery
• The shocking firing of James B. Comey puts new pressure on Trump and his team
• Trump is mirroring Nixon’s final days
• Firing Comey is a thuggish abuse of executive power

I am not sure this is an exhaustive list. I listed several that stood out as noteworthy. It is hysteria bordering on mental illness. There isn’t even a pretense of an objective analysis of the facts in the case.

As we noted in part one of our series on the phony dossier, “It appears that the only significant Russia connection the media have left out is the story that Accuracy in Media first broke in 2015 when we revealed retired Lt. General Michael T. Flynn’s attendance at a public conference in Moscow with Russian president Vladimir Putin.”

One big factor in the Post’s hatred of Trump is the role played by Post columnist David Ignatius in getting an illegal leak of classified information about Flynn. The paper wants desperately to divert attention away from the fact that Ignatius can be prosecuted under the law.

As we noted, “Whether Flynn disclosed the entire story about his Russian contacts remains to be seen. The matter is irrelevant to the far more serious issue in Flynn’s case, namely the illegal disclosure of his wiretapped conversations to CIA mouthpiece David Ignatius of The Washington Post. Unraveling how and why this occurred could shed light on the Watergate-style surveillance that President Obama or his aides authorized on the Trump campaign and how the political intelligence was shared with Hillary’s operatives in the bureaucracy.”

One of the above cited Post columns, “The Comey debacle only magnifies the Russia mystery,” is by Ignatius. He calls developments a “dark tale” and claims that the mission of a new FBI director “will include investigating Trump himself.” Yet Trump says Comey confirmed that the FBI is not investigating the President.

In fact, a new FBI director should investigate Ignatius and his CIA-connected employer, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

“Already,” says Ignatius, “congressional pressure is building for an independent counsel—which is the most sensible way to restore a measure of public confidence after this debacle.”

The lack of confidence is in the media. And the Post doesn’t even seem to know or care.

As we argued in our column, “Investigate and Prosecute the Press,” since it’s doubtful that Ignatius will volunteer his testimony and reveal his sources, a subpoena would be necessary. We pointed out, “He can then be prosecuted if, as expected, he conceals the names of those who used him as a conduit for illegal leaks of classified information.”

Trump is the elected President. He had the legal right to fire Comey for incompetence and other flaws outlined in Department of Justice memos. There is no evidence of any illegal activity by Trump, and the President says that Comey cleared him.

The evidence of illegal activity lies with the Post and its anonymous sources in the intelligence community. Publishing a hundred or a thousand anti-Trump columns cannot change this basic fact.

The paper should try to bring some basic standards of objectivity and fairness back to its coverage of the Trump administration. Otherwise, it will continue to be outwitted by Trump and his Tweets. The history of journalism has taken a “dark” turn with a paper whose promise under Trump became “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

We predict the coverage will go from hysterical to laughable, since Bezos can underwrite this kind of material forever. The problem is that the paper’s liberal writers don’t seem to know the difference. At least it’s entertaining. It is a journalistic meltdown on public display.

Cliff Kincaid