Comey/Mueller/Schumer/Bharara playbook being used against Trump

In fact, the current episode is not the first time Comey and his associates plotted to oust a sitting Republican official through highly orchestrated political theater and carefully crafted narratives in which Comey is the courageous hero bravely fighting to preserve the rule of law.

The pivotal scene in the Comey-crafted narrative, a drama that made Comey famous and likely paved the road to his 2013 appointment by President Barack Obama to run the FBI, occurred in a Beltway hospital room in early 2004. In Comey’s view, Comey was the last honest man in Washington, the only person standing between a White House that rejected any restraints on its power, and the rule of law protecting Americans from illegal mass surveillance.

A former White House counsel and attorney general with extensive first-hand experience dealing with Comey, however, paints a very different picture of what happened in that hospital room, and disputes numerous key details. In this account, Comey’s actions showcase a duplicitous, secretive schemer whose true loyalties were not to the officials to whom he reported, but to partisan Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). To fully understand and appreciate Jim Comey’s approach to politics, the writings and testimony of Alberto Gonzales, who served as both White House counsel and attorney general during the events in question and is intimately aware of Comey’s history of political maneuvering, is absolutely essential.

What happened in Ashcroft’s hospital room in March of 2004 later became political fodder for a hearing in which Senate Democrats used Comey to dredge up the 2004 hospital meeting to tar Gonzales’ credibility and suggest he was unfit to continue serving as attorney general. As the 2004 and 2007 sagas show, Comey is clearly no stranger to using the unarguably legal dismissal of government employees as the backdrop for casting himself as the story’s protaganist standing up to the forces of corruption.

“I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that,” Comey said.

Comey’s use of the phrase “overrule me” is especially noteworthy, given that the authority he referenced belongs not to the deputy attorney general, but to the attorney general himself. However, unbeknownst to anyone at the White House on that day,

Comey had assumed for himself the authorities attendant to Ashcroft’s position. Rather than personally informing anyone at the White House

, including the president, the vice president, the White House chief of staff, or the White House counsel, the Department of Justice sent a mere fax to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue noting the change in power.

For some reason, the newly designated acting attorney general didn’t feel compelled to personally inform any of his superiors that he was now a cabinet official.

Gonzales was taken aback by Comey’s appearance and testimony. It turns out that was by design.

Comey kept secret his pre-hearing planning with Schumer and his staff to maximize the fallout of the bomb

he planned to drop on Gonzales and the Bush administration. In a significant breach of protocol, Comey also refused to share with the White House or the Department of Justice that he had planned to testify about his work at DOJ, a move which made it impossible for the White House to consider whether it needed to assert executive privilege over portions of Comey’s planned testimony.

As fate would have it, the Schumer staffer who spearheaded the entire spectacle was none other than Preet Bharara,

a former employee of Comey’s in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York.

Gonzales also questioned whether Bharara’s role in ambushing the previous Republican presidential administration was the reason Obama later appointed Bharara to Comey’s old job as U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York.

GONZALES’S BELIEF, EXPRESSED IN THE BOOK, THAT COMEY AND BHARARA COLLUDED IN SECRET WITH SCHUMER IN AN ATTEMPT TO TAKE DOWN A TOP BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL IS NO UNSUPPORTED CONSPIRACY THEORY, AS BHARARA HIMSELF CONFIRMED GONZALES’S SUSPICIONS ABOUT COMEY’S SCHEME IN A 2016 INTERVIEW WITH THE NEW YORKER‘S JEFFREY TOOBIN

This brings us back to 2017 and an emerging drama in which Comey and his former employees Bharara and Goldsmith are once again key actors. THIS CLEARLY ISN’T THEIR FIRST RODEO, NOR THE FIRST TIME THEY HAVE WORKED TOGETHER TO PRESENT A PUBLIC NARRATIVE in which Comey plays the role of the last honest man who just wants to figure out if Col. Jessup ordered the Code Red.

https://thefederalist.com/2017/05/17/former-attorney-general-on-comeys-integrity-jims-loyalty-was-more-to-chuck-schumer/