“Straight news” correspondent Catherine Herridge abetted Fox’s Operation Collusion Cover-Up by overstating the significance of a report from the Department of Justice Inspector General that criticized former FBI Director James Comey’s handling of memos while she conveniently ignored the evidence of corruption he was preserving.
Let’s not forget Comey was acting as a whistleblower in response to serious Trump wrongdoing
You have to read almost to the end of The Washington Post report to understand just how unimportant Comey’s rule-breaking was, especially in comparison to what the memos documented: Trump trying to pressure the FBI in its Russia investigation by asking for Comey’s “loyalty” and by asking him to let go of the investigation into Michael Flynn:
Comey left three of the seven memos he wrote at the FBI, believing some of them contained classified information, the inspector general wrote. He kept original copies of four in a personal safe at his home and gave copies of those to his attorneys after Trump fired him from the FBI, the inspector general wrote.
Of those memos that he gave to his attorneys, two had classified information — though Comey redacted the material from one of them, the inspector general wrote. The other, the inspector general wrote, had six words the FBI determined to be confidential. The memo shared with [Columbia Law School Professor Daniel] Richman was determined to be “For Official Use Only,” but did not contain classified information, the inspector general wrote.
What were those six “confidential” words? They hardly sound like state secrets. The IG report stated (Page 2, footnote 3), “Four of the six words in Memo 2 that the FBI determined were classified were the names of foreign countries being discussed by the President. As described later in this report, the President referenced the countries when he conveyed his personal views on the relative importance of promptly returning telephone calls from the leadership of the named countries."
Furthermore, as NBC News correspondent Julia Ainsley noted, sharing confidential, not classified, information with a lawyer is exactly “what a lot of whistleblowers do out of Washington.”
Mark Sumner nicely summed up the situation at Daily Kos:
[I]n the mind of Inspector General Michael Horowitz, concerns about the future of the nation and proper administration of the Justice Department did not trump (small T) the FBI’s internal rules over document handling. Which makes this entire report a triumph of upholding the most picayune regulation even in the face of the greatest possible threat.
Fox’s Herridge massaged the facts in order to paint Comey as a criminal (and imply Trump is a victim)
Enter Catherine Herridge, Fox’s “chief intelligence correspondent” who seems to credulously regurgitate every Republican talking point she encounters. She took the triumph of picayune regulation over Trump corruption to a whole new level.
Herridge deliberately put forth the impression that the report had unearthed some big criminality on Comey’s part (spoiler alert: the Trump DOJ has already decided not to prosecute) while not even bothering to mention why Comey thought it important to write memos about Trump misconduct and put them in his personal safe.
Instead, Herridge seized the moment to suggest that Comey had infected the entire FBI: “It’s certainly not every day that the inspector general is tasked with investigating the actions of a former FBI director who really sets the tone at the top of the bureau for 35,000 people,” she said at the outset.
She went on to note that Comey leaked some of the documents “in order to kick start the special counsel investigation.” Yet she didn’t seem to think it worth mentioning why Comey felt the need for a special counsel investigation. She suggested he was being careless or deliberately negligent as she presented his behavior in the most damning way she probably could have gotten away with. For extra Trumper points, she disingenuously likened Comey to Hillary Clinton.
She didn’t bother to mention that unlike Clinton's "convenience" claim, Comey had a seriously good reason, even if not permissible under the rules, for storing such material at home - because it was out of Trump's reach. But Herridge implied that Comey's motive was nefarious.
And then, finally, the thing to look for is whether Director Comey was straightforward with investigators about his actions on the memos. There’s something in FBI-speak called “lack of candor.” That means the individual has spun their explanation and not been straightforward with investigators. And I’m going through the records right now and already I see a pretty significant headline.
… In this section, on page 52, there’s a very important headline from the inspector general. When Director Comey testified, he said he felt these memos were his personal recollections of recorded events. But this is an explanation which does not satisfy the inspector general. He states, “Comey’s characterization of the memos as personal records” - this is important – “finds no support in the law and is wholly incompatible with the plain language of the statutes.”
Herridge repeated that last part for incriminating emphasis.
America’s Newsroom co-anchor Sandra Smith interrupted to prompt Herridge to smear Comey in layman’s terms. She noted that Comey had responded on Twitter by saying, “And to all those who’ve spent two years talking about me ‘going to jail’ or being a ‘liar and a leaker’—ask yourselves why you still trust people who gave you bad info for so long, including the president.”
“What does that tell you, Catherine, about the way that James Comey is taking in this report?” Smith “asked.”
“It doesn’t change, if I could say, some of the cold, hard facts of the findings here,” Herridge replied.
Watch the misleading reporting that Fox will surely use to gaslight its viewers into thinking that nothing Comey said or did is trustworthy while the network continues to distract from Trump’s collusion with Russia in plain sight. The clip is above, from the August 29, 2019 America’s Newsroom.
Published with permission from News Hounds.
