Barack Obama Was Wrong to Name James Comey FBI Chief
Edit-From a comment I had posted earlier
Just because I’m a little beyond Indy, extra skeptical shall we say. The common partisan view of Wikileaks reversed this election because of this election. Now on Comey.
With all due respect to long time GOP guy Painter I’m feeling kinda meh on any actual legal violation by Comey. Caveat, pay walled out of the full article. Plus I have not liked him for quite some time.
I feel that he plays surveillance on the public in the crime and long war without nearly enough regard to our privacy. That privacy in the face of big data technology as applied to things like licence plate readers, cell meta data etc. President Obama who has powerfully embraced the latest technology and firepower in order to eschew boots on the ground against terror appointed an ally in that. Nothing wrong with that except when we get to net results. Again, just my opinion. Most of this is in pages I put up over the years.
Shorter-I have a hard time thinking this is the right guy for the job no matter what news comes forth.
When President Barack Obama named James Comey director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2013, many of the president’s supporters applauded the choice. As potential FBI directors go, the thinking went, the guy was pretty liberal. Earlier that year, he had signed an amicus brief calling for the Supreme Court to overturn California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 and legalize same-sex marriage. He was famous for a 2004 standoff with top White House attorney Alberto Gonzales at the bedside of ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft. Gonzales had tried to pressure the incapacitated AG to sign off on a domestic spying program, but Comey intercepted Gonzales in the hospital room. The document was never signed and Comey threatened to resign if the program continued without reforms.
It’s a neat, heroic story. But it’s probably not why Obama tapped Comey for the top FBI post.
Comey shares two of the Obama administration’s most consistent and unnerving legal leanings: a proclivity for mass surveillance and an aversion to Wall Street accountability.
After the hospital showdown, Comey co-authored a legal memo modifying the Bush administration’s domestic spying program that authorized the wiretapping of millions of Americans without a search warrant. It was fine for the administration to directly violate a law passed by Congress, the memo reasoned, because as commander in chief after “a foreign attack on the United States,” the president has “inherent constitutional authority” that “Congress cannot curtail.” This inventive rationale not only allowed the program to proceed, it helped protect its architects and implementers from prosecution. Who could blame the intelligence community for doing something the top administration lawyers had assured them was legal?
More: Barack Obama Named James Comey FBI Chief For All The Wrong Reasons