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Tag: james kallstrom
For Comey, Hard Questions About Rudy Giuliani And The FBI

For Comey, Hard Questions About Rudy Giuliani And The FBI

For months, the White House has insistently whined that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is persecuting the president. Echoed by right-wing propaganda media, that theme is now amplified in Donald Trump’s tweeted blasts at former FBI director James Comey, whom he vilifies as a “liar and leaker.”

 To anyone who remembers the final days of the presidential election, Trump’s paranoid claims have always seemed ludicrous. If the bureau appeared to be tilted, it was firmly in his direction, especially in its handling of the criminal investigations of him and Hillary Clinton.

 Now Comey’s media tour promoting his new book, A Higher Loyalty, offers an opportunity to debunk such mythologizing — and to ask a few unanswered questions about the bureau’s perverse role in that election.

 In his book and media appearances, the former director tries to justify his denunciation of Clinton’s management of her emails in July 2016 when he declined to recommend prosecution — and his stunning revelation, less than two weeks before Election Day, that the bureau was examining emails on a laptop owned by her aide Huma Abedin.

 Comey insists those fateful choices reflected his moral instincts. But they also appear to have arisen from internal political dissension and thinly veiled threats of negative leaking about the Clinton probe.

 Openly voicing such threats, on Fox News and other media outlets, were former prosecutor and mayor Rudolph Giuliani and James Kallstrom, a former head of the New York FBI office. Both men repeatedly claimed to be in contact with FBI agents furious over the decision not to prosecute the Democratic nominee – if true, a blatant violation of Justice Department rules and traditions.

 As a Trump campaign surrogate, Giuliani said he had spoken with FBI agents who were “embarrassed” by Comey’s decision not to prosecute Clinton. Going further, Kallstrom warned that those agents were “not going to take this sitting down.” Appearing on Fox in late September, Kallstrom said that the agents working on the Clinton case “feel like they were stabbed in the back,” and added, “I think we’re going to see a lot more of the facts come out in the course of the next few months. That’s my prediction.”

 On October 26, just two days before Comey informed Congress about the Abedin emails, Giuliani hinted on Fox that Trump “has got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days…We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn this thing around.”

 Which “couple of things” did Giuliani mean, exactly?

 Meanwhile the grave details of the FBI counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russian connections, opened in July 2016, remained secret from the public. The only apparent leak about that probe appeared in a New York Times article the week before Election Day, under a headline that minimized its seriousness: “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link To Russia.”  That was an actual cover-up, with shattering consequences.

 The blatant political pressure from within the FBI to discredit Clinton disturbed Democrats for months after the election. Among them was Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), a former FBI special agent himself, who inquired about that sore subject when Comey made his final appearance as FBI director before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“During your investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, a number of surrogates like Rudy Giuliani claimed to have a pipeline to the FBI….He even said that he had – insinuated that he had advanced warning about the [Abedin] emails described in your October letter. Former FBI agent Jim Kallstrom made similar claims. Now either they’re lying, or there’s a serious problem within the bureau.”

Comey told Leahy he was investigating those troubling circumstances. “I don’t know yet. But if I find out that people were leaking information about our investigations, whether it’s to reporters or to private parties, there will be severe consequences.”

Nothing came of that promise, made not long before Trump fired him. But the questions remain:

Did Comey ever investigate leaks from within the bureau to Giuliani and Kallstrom? What did he learn about their contacts and activities? Did he take any action when he heard their televised claims that agents were discussing the investigation with them? Does he know who leaked the stories about the Abedin emails and the Clinton Foundation? And does he know whether FBI director Christopher Wray or the Inspector General of the Justice Department are examining these breaches of conduct?

He’s doing a lot of interviews. Someone should ask him.

In The Shadows, Rogue FBI Agents Deface Democracy

In The Shadows, Rogue FBI Agents Deface Democracy

Whatever the outcome next Tuesday, our political system crossed a perilous rubicon during the days leading up to that climax: For the first time in recent memory, officials of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency sought to influence a national election with illicit leaks.

Murky information about investigations of Hillary Clinton’s emails and the Clinton Foundation, even fraudulent rumors of “indictments” have flooded the media, all somehow traced back to the FBI — with Rudolph Giuliani of the Trump campaign boasting on Fox News that he had advance knowledge of these manipulations.

Owing to his longstanding connections with the bureau, Giuliani had predicted “a couple of surprises” to come in late October, just days before FBI director James Comey sent his fateful letter to Congress about reviewing new emails in the Clinton case he closed last July.

“You’ll see, and I think it will be enormously effective,” he said on Fox News. In fact. Giuliani had joined in publicly pressuring Comey for months, claiming to know of a “revolt” among agents against the decision not to prosecute Clinton.

Having covered the investigations of the New York FBI office for more than 30 years, reporter Wayne Barrett drew the connections between Giuliani, former FBI supervisor James Kallstrom (also a vocal Trump supporter), and the leaks that have plagued the Clinton campaign in The Daily Beast. Among the handful of real charitable donations ever made by Trump are some generous payments to a charity headed by Kallstrom — who, like Giuliani, predicted last summer that disgruntled agents might reveal “a lot more of the facts” about the email probe “come out in the next few months.”

Now perhaps those agents — along with Giuliani, Kallstrom, and their friend Donald Trump — don’t understand that there was nothing scandalous, let alone criminal, in Clinton’s decision to use a private email account like her predecessor Colin Powell. Perhaps they don’t understand that Clinton’s handling of “classified” emails — characterized as “extremely careless” by Comey, in one of his departures from normal Justice Department practice — was altogether routine in the federal government, where classification standards vary by department and change often. Perhaps they also don’t understand why Comey found that the evidence showed no bad intent by Clinton or the lawyers who reviewed her emails to delete personal material.

And perhaps they don’t realize why the public integrity professionals at the Justice Department rejected their ridiculous determination to investigate the Clinton Foundation, based on discredited accusations in a book created and publicized by the political extremist who later became the chief executive of Trump’s campaign. (The reported eagerness of federal agents to pursue the canards in that book doesn’t reflect well on their forensic skills, but that’s a different problem.)

It is more likely that the FBI agents involved in this operation do understand why prosecutors — including Comey, a former U. S. attorney and deputy attorney general — but simply don’t care because they are right-wing ideologues with a partisan preference. But that distinction doesn’t matter much, because in either case they have violated their oaths and their duty as federal agents, by seeking to influence this election through leaks.

Leaking investigative material is always a violation of the rules that govern the judicial system — which protect the rights of all citizens. In the days and weeks before an election, violating those rules to achieve a partisan objective is an assault on democracy.

During the last presidential election cycle, Attorney General Eric Holder reminded all employees of the Justice Department, including every FBI agent, of the rules that govern their conduct in a March 2012 memorandum titled “Election Year Sensitivities”:

Simply put, politics must play no role in the decisions of federal investigators or prosecutors regarding any investigations or criminal charges. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of investigative steps or criminal charges for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party. Such a purpose is inconsistent with the Department’s mission and with the Principles of Federal Prosecution.

That last sentence is mild language for a despicable act. In a police state, prosecutors and police agents seek to direct politics from the shadows. In a democracy, law enforcement officials must never attempt to influence elections. What the rogue agents have done in these past few days is all too similar to the standard practice in Putin’s Russia and other authoritarian states. It is far below the American constitutional standard that those agents swore to uphold.

IMAGE: Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani