Be More Than Mildly Nauseous: It’s James Comey Day

One year ago today, James Comey sent a letter informing Congress that investigators had discovered a laptop that had emails to Hillary Clinton’s aide-de-camp on it. The letter was, of course, immediately leaked by 30-day-old French Fry grease in vaguely human form Jason Chaffetz, who COULDN’T LOOK HIS DAUGHTER IN THE EYE if…[Trump goes up in polls by two points] he didn’t do everything he could to elect Donald Trump. The chances that these emails would contain evidence of illegal actions by Hillary Clinton were infinitesimal; indeed, since emails have senders as well as recipients, the odds that the laptop would have significant numbers of emails involving Hillary Clinton that hadn’t already been read were extremely long. The emails were quickly determined to be redundant or otherwise immaterial. But Comey’s decision to issue the letter and the eminently foreseeable orgy of negative press coverage about Hillary Clinton that it generated — although, again, no misbehavior by Hillary Clinton had actually been uncovered — almost certainly changed the outcome of an election that was decided by fewer than 100,000 votes.

The man Comey put in the White House ungratefully fired him, helping to ensure that Comey’s always unjustified reputation as a Straight Shooter with Impeccable Integritude would be largely restored. Don’t be fooled — Comey is one of the most important villains of this awful era in American Politics and should be remembered as such, and it’s one of the dark ironies of Life Under Trump that the pretextural reasons given for firing Comey were also dead accurate.