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Comey Details The ‘Four Stages’ Of Being Attacked By President Trump

   DailyWire.com
James Comey, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), gestures during a Bloomberg Television interview in Salzburg, Austria, on Friday, June 21, 2019. Comey said he hopes President Donald Trump isn’t impeached because "that would let the American people off the hook." Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg
Alex Kraus/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Despite mounting evidence of his failure to keep politics out of the bureau’s official business, former FBI Director James Comey continues to insist that he was wrongly faulted for his handling of his position — particularly the Hillary Clinton investigation, for which he has received strong criticism from both sides of the aisle — and that, in the end, he is simply a victim of Trump’s vindictiveness. In an op-ed published by The Washington Post on Monday, Comey, who was unceremoniously fired by Trump in spring 2017, adds another few hundred words to his ongoing complaint about Trump’s treatment of him, offering a first-hand description of the four stages of being “personally and publicly” attacked by the president.

Comey has come under renewed fire in recent weeks amid revelations from the final report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who identified “at least 17 significant errors or omissions” in FISA applications submitted by FBI officials for surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, resulting in “wrong or incomplete information” being provided to the Justice Department by Comey’s bureau. Horowitz also determined that the Democrat-funded Steele dossier “played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order” that ultimately sparked the years-long “Russia collusion” investigation. Though Comey has continued to defend the bureau, the findings were egregious enough to force him to admit that he had been “overconfident” about the FISA process.

With more heat being directed his way amid the damaging details provided in the lengthy report, Comey portrays himself in his new op-ed as a victim of political and personal bias and attempts to align himself with other targets of the president. Being “attacked by the president,” Comey explains in the piece, consists of “four stages.”

Stage One: Having your world rocked.

“At first, the attack is stunning and rocks your world,” Comey writes. “Waking up to find the president has tweeted that you are guilty of treason or committed assorted other crimes and are a [insert any one of this president’s epithets here] is jarring and disorienting. That’s the first stage, but it doesn’t last.”

Stage Two: Settling into “a kind of numbness.”

“The second stage is a kind of numbness, where it doesn’t seem quite real that the so-called Leader of the Free World is assailing you by tweet and voice,” Comey explains. “It is still unsettling, but it is harder to recapture the vertigo of the first assault.” This stage, he explains, offers one consolation: “the longer it goes on, the less it means.”

Stage Three: The strange and sad old guy (and his sad supporters’) stage.

“In the third stage, the impact diminishes, the power of it shrinks,” he writes. “It no longer feels as though the most powerful human on the planet is after you. It feels as though a strange and slightly sad old guy is yelling at you to get off his lawn, echoed by younger but no less sad people in red hats shouting, ‘Yeah, get off his lawn!'”

Stage Four: Time to go full Alexander Hamilton.

This final stage drives Comey to waxing eloquent and invoking founding fathers. It’s in this stage that “we” (all Trump’s victims, presumably) must “fight through our fatigue and contempt for this shrunken, withered figure,” Comey declares.

“Spurred by the danger he poses to our nation and its values, we have to overcome the shock and numbness of earlier stages,” says Comey, sounding an awful lot like the Democrats leading the impeachment charge. “We must not look away. We must summon the effort necessary to protect this republic from Alexander Hamilton’s great fear, that when an unprincipled person ‘is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

After the release of the Horowitz report, Comey appeared on Fox News to discuss its findings and was forced to admit he’d been wrong about his FBI and the FISA process.

“I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years,” said Comey after being confronted with past assertions of “total confidence that the FISA process was followed and that the entire case was handled in a thoughtful, responsible way by DOJ and the FBI.”

“I thought they were robust enough,” Comey continued. “It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA. I was overconfident in those. Because he’s right. There was real sloppiness, 17 things that either should’ve been in the applications or at least discussed and characterized differently. It was not acceptable and so he’s right.  I was wrong.”

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