Embattled former FBI Director James Comey is aiming at President Donald Trump with his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” but he may end up taking scalps he didn’t anticipate taking.
According to a “good friend” of Comey’s, Benjamin Wittes, who spoke to Fox News, a forthcoming report about the inner workings of President Obama’s Department of Justice will skim over Comey’s role in the Clinton emails probe and focus squarely on Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who Comey is convinced is far more responsible than he for the department’s “train wreck” of an investigation.
Wittes told Fox that “the consideration of other decision-makers, ‘particularly Lynch,’ paint a full picture for those people who believe the probe was a ‘train wreck’ that cost Clinton the 2016 presidential election.”
Wittes gave few further details, but claimed that Lynch was a “compromised figure” when it came to the Clintons, and that Lynch allowed Comey to “fall on that grenade” — by which he means becoming the target of blame for oddities in the Clinton email probe — and that she told him, directly, to “look beat up” about the investigation when it relaunched just days before Election Day.
He also named Lynch deputy Sally Yates as being complicit in the frame-up. “Her deputy, Sally Yates, did not persuade her to step aside. In October, when Comey decided to inform Congress of new investigative steps, both women contented themselves with staff-level messages objecting,” Wittes said.
It’s clear that Comey and Lynch are intent on getting into a war of words. Late Sunday, Lynch, sensing that Comey had laid some of the blame for his own malfeasance at her feet, fired back at the former FBI director on Twitter, suggesting that if Comey had the problems he described in his memoir, that he could have come to the Attorney General’s office for help and explanation — and he didn’t.
Wittes could certainly be trying to do some preemptive damage control for his friend, in case Lynch decides to forcefully fight back.
A civil war is brewing among anti-Trump forces. The report on the Clinton email investigation is due out within the next several months.