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FBI Director James Comey Sacked
The Washington Post reports that:
FBI Director James B. Comey has been dismissed by the president [...] a startling move that officials said stemmed from a conclusion by Justice Department officials that he had mishandled the probe of Hillary Clinton's emails.
Previously:
Clinton Told FBI She Relied on Others' Judgment on Classified Material
FBI Recommends No Prosecution for Clinton
F.B.I. Director James Comey Is Fired by Trump
President Trump has fired FBI Director James Comey:
President Trump has fired the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, over his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, the White House said Tuesday.
[...] Under the F.B.I.'s normal rules of succession, Mr. Comey's deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, a career F.B.I. officer, becomes acting director. The White House said the search for a new director will begin immediately.
I never liked Comey (see this cluster of stories), but I doubt there will ever be an FBI Director I like.
Related:
We're Stuck With Comey
Earlier in the day...
FBI Director Comey Misstated Huma Abedin Evidence at Last Week's Hearing
ProPublica reports that most of FBI Director James Comey's testimony to Congress last Wednesday related to Huma Abedin's mishandling of classified emails was inaccurate, and that FBI officials are privately acknowledging the mistake(s) but are still considering their next move:
FBI director James Comey generated national headlines last week with his dramatic testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, explaining his "incredibly painful" decision to go public about the Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner's laptop.
Perhaps Comey's most surprising revelation was that Huma Abedin — Weiner's wife and a top Clinton deputy — had made "a regular practice" of forwarding "hundreds and thousands" of Clinton messages to her husband, "some of which contain classified information." Comey testified that Abedin had done this so that the disgraced former congressman could print them out for her boss. (Weiner's laptop was seized after he came under criminal investigation for sex crimes, following a media report about his online relationship with a teenager.)
The New York Post plastered its story on the front page with a photo of an underwear-clad Weiner and the headline: "HARD COPY: Huma sent Weiner classified Hillary emails to print out." The Daily News went with a similar front-page screamer: "HUMA ERROR: Sent classified emails to sext maniac Weiner."
The problem: Much of what Comey said about this was inaccurate. Now the FBI is trying to figure out what to do about it. FBI officials have privately acknowledged that Comey misstated what Abedin did and what the FBI investigators found. On Monday, the FBI was said to be preparing to correct the record by sending a letter to Congress later this week. But that plan now appears on hold, with the bureau undecided about what to do.
[...] According to two sources familiar with the matter — including one in law enforcement — Abedin forwarded only a handful of Clinton emails to her husband for printing — not the "hundreds and thousands" cited by Comey. It does not appear Abedin made "a regular practice" of doing so. Other officials said it was likely that most of the emails got onto the computer as a result of backups of her Blackberry.
Also at Washington Post (alternate analysis), The Hill, The New York Post, and USA Today.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BK on Wednesday May 10 2017, @01:11AM (32 children)
Consider this before down-modding jmorris on this one: If Comey had done his job (as jmorris has explained it anyway), he'd now be dealing with a President Sanders.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 4, Informative) by epitaxial on Wednesday May 10 2017, @01:23AM (12 children)
The democrats themselves didn't want Bernie. Bernie won't take corporate money.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @01:54AM (11 children)
Correction, The DNC did not want Bernie. They wanted Hillary, and with her anointment, many democrats could register as republicans during the primaries to stuff the ballots with Trump votes to clear the way for the Queen. Backfired pretty good, didn't it? Hee hee. They got what they deserved, and so did the voters for falling for it.
Bernie won't take corporate money.
Not directly, no. But the defense contractors in his state find a way to feed him.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 10 2017, @02:28AM (10 children)
"The DNC did not want Bernie."
That may not be the most accurate characterization. Remember, Wasserman-Schultz resigned in disgrace. I don't think anyone can say for certain what the DNC "wanted", because W-S was Hillary's attack dog, and W-S was in control of the DNC.
I agree, though, that the DNC got what it deserved. Had the Democrat voters had their way, it most likely would have been a Bernie-Trump contest. And, I kinda think that Bernie would have won. I'm certainly not a Sanders fan, but I think that Sanders was the better qualified candidate between the two. I MIGHT have voted for him, myself, had he been on the ballot. Maybe.
I didn't make up my mind who I was voting for, until I sat down at my polling station, and skimmed over the ballot. At that moment, I decided to vote for Johnson. I already knew that I was voting against Hillary, but it was a tossup between Johnson, Stein, or just possibly, Trump.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 10 2017, @06:24AM
Voters tend to reward aggression. Further, the more aggressive one tends to seize the initiative. Then the other party is on the defensive, reacting to attacks rather than putting their own message out, which is a poor way to run a race.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by VLM on Wednesday May 10 2017, @11:52AM (8 children)
Sanders was the better qualified candidate
For... being a senator yes. He has tons of legislative experience. "Bernie for speaker of the house" etc.
However his only executive experience was being mayor of some podunk 30K town 40 years ago. It took a long time but we finally had a presidential candidate who made Sarah Palin from '08 look dramatically overqualified.
Another problem Bernie had was the typical "never done anything but sit on the government gravy train" AFAIK he's never earned an honest dollar in his life. I donno if Trump's antics are a blueprint for America but he certainly didn't sit in the ivory tower his whole life.
Having basically zero executive experience he's not really qualified for even a cabinet level position, but he might be able to grow into it and use his legislative branch skills. He would have made a good deputy director or lower level functionary of HUD or Ed in the Trump admin, perhaps.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 10 2017, @12:32PM
This is only because uvory is too expensive for the Trump tower.
Otherwise, I don't know what reality show I'm watching today: MAGA or The Apprentice. Not that it would matter, both are equality crap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:01PM (3 children)
If you're counting cabinet positions as "executive experience" it looks like we've had 12 presidents with none of {vice president, governor, cabinet}. That's slightly over a quarter of the total.
Andrew Jackson - senator
William Henry Harrison - senator
Zachary Taylor - military
Franklin Pierce - senator
Abraham Lincoln - representative
Ulysses S. Grant - military
James Garfield - representative
Benjamin Harrison - senator
Warren Harding - senator
Dwight D. Eisenhower - military
John F. Kennedy - senator
Barack Obama - senator
So it seems pretty reasonable to elect presidents based on their Senate experience only. I mean hell, we just had Obama for 8 years and he was "only" a senator.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:06PM
Drat, forgot to source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_previous_experience [wikipedia.org]
That only lists the last 3 positions but I would think that would include the most important ones.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:08PM
Er, 13 counting Trump.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:35PM
Yeah and 'bama was ... great, yeah just great. History is not going to be kind to that human paperweight, that placeholder.
Its kinda important that Grant, Ike, and JFK had a significant amount of wartime military commander experience either at high levels or on the front line. So its not like they had never been in charge of anything. Likewise I gave Trump a pass based on his extensive business experience.
My favorite eras of history don't involve these dudes. Maybe Harrison was his eras equivalent of a billionaire or I forgot he was a naval admiral or something like that. Probably not, but maybe. Its very unusual but I have occasionally made mistakes. Anyway, weasel words aside, if you take the list and cross off the ex-mil leaders and ex-business leaders, you're pretty much stuck with, um, "they're not sending their best" is the phrase? When even wikipedia has lines describing a Democrat, a Democrat mind you, like "Pierce is viewed by presidential historians as an inept chief executive" ... whoa feel the burn. If he were a Republican given wiki-politics that line would be the usual "literally hitler" stuff.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:14PM (2 children)
The same can be said about Trump. He's lost more money than he's made and has only been able to hide it because of shady accounting, tax law abuse, and daddy's money.
Why do you think he is hiding his tax information? There's only one conclusion that makes sense: releasing his taxes would prove that he's not the multi-billionaire he claims to be and is actually nothing more than a sleazy used car salesman and a mediocre one at that.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:39PM (1 child)
Trump sounds like America, doesn't he? I think thats great. Actually he sounds like Hollywood. Or Detroit. Or the military industrial complex. He's just America in a bottle, that guy...
Also I'm talking revenue you're talking profit or maybe balance sheet or maybe life long balance sheet.
I guess the best analogy I can come up with is I'm saying that over the life of the site "AC" has gotten a crapton of upvotes and you're arguing that at the same time the only thing that matters is GNAA raids result in the NET karma of AC, were AC to be a real account, it would likely be somewhat negative. So we're carefully talking about completely different interpretations of the same data.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:56PM
Sounds like something that would wreck the plumbing when you dump it down the toilet.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday May 10 2017, @01:46AM (16 children)
And a first lady being investigated for fraud?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @02:04AM (15 children)
> And a first lady being investigated for fraud?
This is something the Bernie Bros can't grasp.
Bernie never had to endure the spotlight.
As a senator his constituency is tiny, 600K people mostly rural.
Clinton pulled her punches because she did not want to alienate his people in the general.
But if Bernie had won the primary, Trump would have been relentless, ginning up anything and everything.
His wife's problems with the school were already being reported on back then, trump would have gone nuts with it.
And who knows what other flaws are in Bernie's closet? We don't, because nobody ever looked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:02AM
Thanks for Correcting the Record.
Wait, are you just doing this as a hobby now?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:07AM (13 children)
Bernie isn't to blame for Clinton's horrific record which left her exposed to the spotlight. Honestly, I can't comprehend why Republicans hate her so much, because she's a natural for that party. Reference: list of 25 major policy issues in which HRC is just another Republican: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russ-belville/the-problem-with-hillary-clinton_b_9349590.html [huffingtonpost.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:12AM (12 children)
> Bernie isn't to blame for Clinton's horrific record
Don't try to make this about Clinton.
It is about Bernie's actual viability in a general election.
Trump would have shredded him too.
Especially because Trump's appeal was primarily racial anxiety, not economic anxiety. [vox.com]
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:22AM (11 children)
Get real. Clinton -- one of the most loathed politicians of all time from all sides -- came within inches of beating Trump. In other words, Bernie would have pulped him. But you know who would have been saddest about that? Democrats because it would thwart their Republican agenda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:37AM (10 children)
Your entire analysis rests on the assumption that Bernie could survive the spotlight.
As his wife's problems show, he's got problems too.
Furthermore, he regularly underperformed with minorities.
Clinton absolutely thrashed him in southern states.
And that's because his message of economic populism sounds just like the same old white people shit that never did anything good for brown and black people.
Non-white turnout for Bernie would have been worse than Clinton.
And I'm tired of arguing with you. Your clinton derangement syndrome makes you impervious to logic. Not unlike all the pepes that smell of mayo.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday May 10 2017, @04:42AM (9 children)
I know Trump voters who would have voted for Bernie.
The DNC intentionally frontloads all the Southern states, minimizes debate opportunities, colludes with the media to suppress information about Bernie and despite all that, and only manages to coronate Clinton by purging voter roles and reversing popular opinion with Superdelegates. If ever there was a party more deserving of a good ass fucking, I can't think of it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @05:04AM (5 children)
> reversing popular opinion with Superdelegates.
Your delusions are hardcore dude.
Clinton won the primary by a margin of almost 4 million votes. [wikipedia.org]
That's more than her popular vote margin in the general out of like 1/5th the total voters.
No superdelegates were necessary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @03:42PM
Must have been all those illegal votes Trump is always talking about.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 10 2017, @03:49PM (3 children)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/16/clinton-does-best-where-voting-machines-flunk-hacking-tests-hillary-clinton-vs-bernie-sanders-election-fraud-allegations/ [counterpunch.org]
Basically all the superdelegates pledging for Clinton early also had the obvious effect of tilting support to her from the bandwagon.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @07:13PM (2 children)
Basically all the superdelegates pledging for Clinton early also had the obvious effect of tilting support to her from the bandwagon.
If that were the case it would have caused voter suppression during the primary - why vote if it won't make any difference?
And yet they were only marginally down from the 2008's historically high numbers (easily explained by Obama's popularity) and more than double the 2004 primaries.
Yours is the logic of conspiracy - any fact in isolation that "proves" your predetermined outcome is highlighted, everything else is ignored.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 10 2017, @08:01PM (1 child)
If that were the case it would have caused voter suppression during the primary - why vote if it won't make any difference?
Oh really? You're sure? People vote for lots of different reasons, not all of them rational. Maybe the set of people who didn't bother to vote were balanced out by a different set that were driven to vote for some other reason.
Yours is the logic of conspiracy - any fact in isolation that "proves" your predetermined outcome is highlighted, everything else is ignored.
I know it must be really difficult for you when somebody disagrees with you. So much easier to just call them all haters and conspiracy theorists. After the DNC got caught blatantly throwing Bernie under the bus in their own leaked communications, it's hardly inconceivable that there was indeed collusion in regards to primary votes. Next you'll say that Snowden and the repeated admissions that they still kept doing it after being told multiple times to stop is no reason to distrust the NSA that they've stopped domestic spying.
As I've pointed out before, you don't have a leg to stand on with slinging mud about people being "conspiracy theorists" when you won't even put a pseudonym behind *your* words. Anonymous Coward indeed.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11 2017, @02:35AM
After the DNC got caught blatantly throwing Bernie under the bus in their own leaked communications,
Yet another example of your conspiracy logic. They did no such thing. A couple of people were talking shit about Bernie in what amounted to office gossip. JFC, if that qualifies as "throwing Bernie under the bus" then you have never seen a bus.
Quite acting like a hysterical little girl.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @08:19AM (2 children)
I know Trump voters who would have voted for Bernie.
No doubt you helped convince them to vote for Trump too.
Clinton wasn't the problem. Your enthusiastic collusion with the republican party to smear a run-of-the-mill centrist democrat as being the devil incarnate is to blame.
Not you alone, you had a lot of other hyperbolic buddies doing the same thing, making her out to be worse than trump.
But if any one poster on soylent is culpable, its you and your useful idiocy. What a freaking tool.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @08:42AM (1 child)
Clinton wasn't the problem.
Are you serious? She supported mass surveillance, voted for the Iraq war, supported the TPP countless times, likely supported all the other nonsense like the TSA, and so on. Trump may have been the same on many of those issues, but that doesn't make any of those positions okay; it just makes them both evil, even if Clinton was less evil. Many of those issues are 'strike one, you're out' to me, so obviously I didn't vote for Clinton or Trump.
While many people may exaggerate Clinton's evil, you understate it. Being a partisan hack isn't going to get you anywhere.
Your enthusiastic collusion with the republican party to smear a run-of-the-mill centrist democrat as being the devil incarnate is to blame.
I would say the blame lies squarely on people who voted for Clinton in the primaries and the DNC for being biased against Bernie (even though that alone didn't result in his loss). Stop putting forth run-of-the-mill centrist democrats (i.e. evil scumbags) and maybe people could be more enthusiastic. Sure, you could say that anyone who didn't vote for Candidate A is to blame for Candidate A losing, but if Candidate A is terrible, not voting for them is justified, so just assigning blame is meaningless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @07:22PM
Are you serious? She supported mass surveillance, voted for the Iraq war, supported the TPP countless times, likely supported all the other nonsense like the TSA, and so on.
Don't magnify your personal issues. None of that, not even the Iraq war, matter all that much to the average voter. Sure its a big deal to the hyper-motivated. But the fact that Clinton got more votes in the 2016 primary than there were total votes in the 2004 primary says that all of those things weren't such a big deal to a large number of voters. Your'e just doing exactly what I accused hemo of, hysterical exaggeration.
Stop putting forth run-of-the-mill centrist democrats (i.e. evil scumbags) and maybe people could be more enthusiastic.
Don't fool yourself. The energy might be with the progressive wing of the democrats. But the majority of the party is still with the centrists.
This election was about trump, not the democrats.
Being a partisan hack isn't going to get you anywhere.
I voted for Bernie. I just don't have my head in the sand about how and why the rest of the party voted.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday May 10 2017, @02:38AM
What makes you so sure?
Hillary already had a VP pick and the Democratic establishment made it clear Bernie, or any other outsider candidate, would not be their pick. It would have been another boring Biden-like neocon like or some such nonsense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @08:13AM
How does that, in anyway, reflect on the honesty of jmorris's interpretation of events?
What, we should mod up jmorris because he advocates for something that, purely incidentally, would have produced a goal that we like?
Jmorris has absolutely nothing to lose by indicting Comey like that, Sanders ain't getting elected.
But jmorris absolutely does have something to gain by portraying Comey has a democratic tool - further reinforcement of his pro-trump narrative.
So no, do not consider what-ifs that will never happen. Consider the honesty of what jmorris wrote. It sure looks dishonest to me, and you are on the same train with your non-sequitur defense of his bullshit.