James Comey and the stinking fish factor

Joan Swirsky, RenewAmerica analyst

(Author's note: In August 2016, I wrote an article entitled "James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor," warning readers that the Comey fish was already rotting and that things were bound to get worse. Clearly, they just did. And it's just as clear that the uncontrolled hysteria we are witnessing from Democrats has to do not with bogus accusations about Russia, but the criminal indictments coming down the pike for the people they've blindly defended for decades – that would be Bill & Hill Clinton – and possibly against even bigger fish! I've updated this article by abbreviating its length but also adding a few sentences. -JS)

I always thought that James Comey was a company man. As it happens, the company he headed is among the most influential, powerful, and scary companies in the world – the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But still, a company guy. Whether working for a president on the moderate-to-conservative spectrum like G.W. Bush or for a far-left Alinsky acolyte like Barack Obama makes absolutely no difference to this type of obedient – and also subservient – accommodator.

The red flag of skepticism should have gone up years ago to the American public when lavish praise was heaped on Comey by people who revile each other. While the spin insists that Comey is a lot of virtuous things – "straight-shooter," "unbiased," "fair-minded," "non-partisan" "man of his word" – don't be fooled. That's Orwellian newspeak for someone who will do and say anything to keep his job, including, as Comey did in yet another Clinton fiasco case last summer, allow her to create out of whole cloth an "intent" criterion in federal law to let a clearly corrupt politician – that would be Hillary – off the hook, and, appropriate the job of the Attorney General in announcing what the outcome of the FBI's investigation should be.

While citing Hillary's "extreme negligence" in handling classified information, a virtual litany of illegal acts committed by the then-Secretary of State, and the fact that hostile foreign operatives may have accessed her email account, Comey said he would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Hillary, he said, was "extremely careless" and "unsophisticated," among other spitballs he hurled in her direction before completely letting her off the hook!

Comey's friend and colleague, Andrew C. McCarthy, said that the FBI director's decision is tantamount to sleight-of-hand trickery. "There is no way of getting around this," McCarthy wrote. "Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation...in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require."


Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of AmericanThinker.com, wrapped the entire debacle up neatly, saying that "the director of the FBI offered 15 of the most puzzling minutes in the history of American law enforcement. James Comey spent the first 12 minutes or so laying out a devastating case dismantling Hillary Clinton's email defense. Then, "in a whiplash- inducing change of narrative, he announced that 'no reasonable prosecutor' would bring the case he had just outlined, an assertion that was contradicted within hours by luminaries including former U.S. attorney (and NY City mayor) Rudy Giuliani and James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI's New York office."

Which begs the question: Why would Comey act contrary to the wisdom of virtually every legal scholar who has written or spoken about this case?

It is certainly not because he wasn't taught by his upstanding parents the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral. One could make the case – and many have – that he is as close to a moral man as it gets in public life. According to his bio in Wikipedia, Comey, a lawyer, majored in religion at the College of William and Mary, and wrote his thesis about the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell, emphasizing their common belief in public action.

The looking-the-other-way factor

That's what company guys do.

Affirming this unflattering opinion, Jerome Corsi, journalist and NY Times bestselling author, said that Comey has a long history of cases ending favorable to the Clintons.

In 2004, Corsi says, Comey was a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department when he "apparently limited the scope of the criminal investigation of Sandy Berger [and Berger's] removal and destruction of classified records from the National Archives. The documents were relevant to accusations that the Clinton administration was negligent in the build-up to the 9/11 terrorist attack."

"Curiously," Corsi continues, "Berger, Lynch and Cheryl Mills (Hillary's longtime advisor and Chief of Staff during her years as Secretary of State) all worked as partners in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson, which prepared tax returns for the Clintons and did patent work for a software firm that played a role in the private email server Hillary Clinton used when she was secretary of state."

Corsi said that "various statements Comey made about Berger's mishandling of classified documents bear comparison to his comments regarding Hillary Clinton's email server" and that Berger, "a convicted thief of classified documents, had been advising Clinton while she served as secretary of state and had access to emails containing classified information."

Yep... a company guy. As an editorial in The Wall St. Journal stated: "Three days after James Comey's soliloquy absolving Hillary Clinton of criminal misuse of classified information, the big winner is – James Comey. He often poses as the deliverer of 'hard truths,' and the hard truth is that he has helped himself politically but not the cause of equal treatment under the law."

Indeed, recommending that Hillary be indicted would have been bad for – ta da – James Comey! "Doing that, however," the editorial goes on, "would have courted fury among Democrats and their media friends. And if Mrs. Clinton later won the election, Mr. Comey might have had to resign before his 10-year term expires in 2023. Otherwise he'd risk becoming persona non grata as Louis Freeh was under Bill Clinton."

The entire, protracted, and fraudulent investigation seems now like a dog-and-pony show for the American public. Here, journalist Bill Still says that during Hillary's interview with the FBI, not only was Comey not present, but it wasn't recorded and she was not under oath!

The persuasion factor

Let's take another upstanding guy, the once-esteemed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, conservative John Roberts. Did I say "conservative"? Silly me. At midnight on Christmas Eve in 2009, the Democrats voted unanimously – without one Republican vote – for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, to inflict the proven-failure of socialized medicine on the American public.

When the constitutionality of the legislation was challenged up to the Supreme Court, a vote of 5-4 affirmed that the individual mandate was constitutional under Congress's taxation powers. It was Roberts who tipped the balance, sending shockwaves of disbelief throughout the country – much like the reaction to Comey's incomprehensible decision on Hillary.

At the time, there was talk of Roberts' "caving" because "someone" had "reached" him and threatened to expose the fact that his two young children had been adopted illegally, a revelation that, if true, would have effectively forced him to resign in ignominy for lying under oath about the adoption. I have no idea if that allegation is true or not, but it made sense to me at the time, particularly because his decision made no sense.

I was also aware of the many allegations listed in websites like Clinton Body Count (and this one too), Bush Body Count, and Obama Body Count, which detail the many people who have gone missing, been killed, had "accidents," or "committed suicide" under each president's tenure, the implication being, of course, that each of these chief executives had a personal "hit" squad to, ahem, remove anyone who threatened their tenure in office, or, more seriously, could land them in prison. Oh, let's not forget the Hillary list compiled by noted radio host Tami Jackson.


Around the time of Comey's colossal whitewash of Hillary's email scandal, the prominent former President of the United Nations General Assembly, John Ashe, died when a barbell dropped on his throat and crushed his larynx. Coincidentally, that very day he was scheduled to testify in a trial about "Chinagate" (of Bill Clinton fame) and, specifically, of the bribery charge against Chinese businessman Ng Lap Seng, and even more specifically of Hillary's links to Seng.

I've followed the persuasion factor not only through "The Godfather" and other mafia-themed movies, but in real life watching Rudy Giuliani deal with and decimate the mob, first as Associate Attorney General under President Reagan and later as mayor of New York.

It's really quite simple how the thug culture works, be it in the Mafia or in government: Find out what a person values and then home in on that vulnerability. Isn't that how ObamaCare passed?

Here Perry Peterson, a retired auditor and tax accountant, documents the many backroom deals that persuaded various politicians to sign on, such as Nebraska's Senator Ben Nelson, who was promised the "Cornhusker kickback" that would pay the full price of expanded Medicaid coverage in Nebraska forever, or Senator Mary L. Landrieu's agreement to sell her vote in the "Louisiana Purchase" for $300,000,000.00 that would flood into her state through added benefits in the ObamaCare bill, on and on and on.

There's more hardball persuasion, to be sure, like reminding the target that you know that his daughter just moved to an off-campus apartment, or that his wife would feel terrible learning about his girlfriend.

Mmmmm...what "persuasion" could possibly be employed on a rich, successful guy like Comey?

The conflict-of-interest factor

Well whaddaya know? According to Investment Watchdog, "It seems that our beloved FBI Director was once a director and board member of HSBC, which is tightly connected to the Clinton Foundation...this is the same HSBC [Swiss bank] that was accused of laundering drug cartel money, was heavily involved in the LIBOR scandal, and who knows what else, and all while our esteemed FBI Director was part of the senior leadership."

Writer Kim McLendon elaborates upon a report issued by one of the few major whistleblowers about the foundation, Wall St. analyst Charles Ortel, who exposed AIG as well as the massive discrepancies in General Electric's finances in 2008. Ortel found more massive discrepancies "between what some of the major donors say they gave to the Clinton Foundation...and what the Clinton Foundation said they got from the donors and what they did with it." The letter he sent to donors, charity regulators, and investigative journalists labeled the charity "the largest charity fraud ever attempted‚ that being the network of illegal activities worldwide, whose heart is the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation."

Ortel goes on to say: "The Clinton Foundation...has been part of an international charity fraud whose entire cumulative scale (counting inflows and outflows) approaches and may even exceed $100 billion measured from 1997 forward. Yet state, federal and foreign government authorities, that should be keenly aware of this massive set of criminal frauds, so far, move at a snail's pace, perhaps waiting for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to reveal the scope of its work and the nature of any findings."

Aha! "Perhaps" the powers-that-be are "waiting for the FBI" to investigate this international con game. And wouldn't that be one James Comey? Is there indeed a conflict of interest that prevents the esteemed director from looking into this ostensibly criminal enterprise?

Writer Tim Brown says that just because Comey was a Director with HSBC "does not assume corruption." But it's notable, he adds, that according to The Guardian, the "Clinton foundation received up to $81 million from clients of controversial HSBC bank."

In March of 2016, Judicial Watch documented the piles of money taken in by The Clinton Foundation, and reported: "Our lawsuit had previously forced the disclosure of documents that provided a road map for over 200 conflict-of-interest rulings that led to at least $48 million in speaking fees for the Clintons during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.

All of this and more led InfoWars reporter Kit Daniels to conclude, "Comey may be on the periphery of Clinton's use of foreign policy to raise money for her foundation, but his position at HSBC may explain in part why she received kid glove treatment while others accused of similar crimes were prosecuted. His connection, however tenuous, should be reason enough to revisit the case and appoint a special prosecutor, as Rep. Matt Salmon of Arizona has demanded."

According to a report by Investors Research Dynamics, "in 2003, Comey became the deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice (DOJ). In 2005, he signed on to serve as general counsel and senior vice president at defense contractor Lockheed Martin. In 2010, he joined Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based investment fund, as its general counsel. On September 4, 2013, James B. Comey was sworn in as the seventh Director of the FBI. Talk about the revolving door in and out of government! A shill for the private defense industry and later a Wall Street investment firm, two of the groups that support Hillary's ascent to the Throne."

Meanwhile, in the early summer of 2016, the IRS preempted the FBI by launching an investigation into what appears to be a full-blown, multi-tentacled criminal enterprise that spans the globe. Was this timed to let Comey slither away untarnished?

Is that why Comey failed to ask Hillary even one question about her Foundation and its seemingly nefarious Kremlin connections? About the indictments (as reported by Michael Sainato) of several of her super-delegates for corruption and ethics violations involving huge sums of money? Of her closest aides for funny money vis-a-vis the Clinton Foundation? About the 181 Clinton Foundation donors who lobbied the State Department while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state? About State Department favors for weapons manufacturers and foreign governments? How about how Hillary's campaign chairman John Podesta bagged $35 million but failed to fully disclose this windfall, or about how Hillary showed remarkable disinterest in going after the murderous butchers of Boko Haram (as reported by Mindy Belz and J.C. Derrick in WORLD Magazine) because, allegedly, millions of dollars in donations were given to the Clinton Foundation by Nigerian billionaires with oil interests in northern Nigeria? On and on and on.

And is it not relevant that Comey's brother, Peter Comey, works at the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation's taxes?

Do any of these (and other) "dots" connect to Comey? Did he ever wonder if any of the 33-thousand emails that Hillary destroyed involved these explosive subjects? Is he just an incurious guy, or does his high position with HSBC and its oh-so-close Clinton Foundation connection make the conflict-of-interest suggestion too uncomfortably plausible?

The stinking fish factor

Whether it's in industry or the military or sports or show business, if failure occurs, it's always the top dog who is accountable. Not the assembly line worker or the buck private or the third baseman who calls the shots, but the one who occupies the ultimate seat of power. Look at what happened at the Democratic National Committee...the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief of Communications, and Chairwoman all resigned because of the hacking that proved the DNC to be both crooked and racist.

That is why they say that the fish stinks from the head, or, in the DNC case, the hydra-headed monster. And the same is true in politics. Which may be the real reason why Comey punted, taking the coward's way out in steadfastly refusing to do what both the law and morality demanded of him.


No matter how you look at Hillary's email scandal, as well as the murders of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Information Officer Sean Smith, and CIA operatives Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods in Benghazi – and for all we know, a dozen paths to the Clinton Foundation – they all led directly to the Oval Office and its former occupant, one Barack Obama. Reminds me of the cards in a Monopoly game: Go to Jail, Go Directly to Jail, Do not Pass Go!

Legal scholar Henry Mark Holzer reminds us that," Hillary was not under oath when she testified before Comey's FBI investigators. Seems to get her off the hook, doesn't it? But under 18 United States Code Section 1001, it is a five-year felony to lie to an FBI agent (and other government officials) about a material fact relevant to an investigation. The federal criminal dockets are loaded with convictions of people who beat the underlying charge only to be convicted of an 18 USC 1001 offense. If Hillary loses the election, keep an eye out for an Obama pardon, to choke off a retributive indictment by a Trump Department of Justice. There is a long road ahead for Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton before the statutes of limitations expire on her crimes."

Whether or not it's the stinking fish factor or something else that compelled James Comey to cave to the Obama Justice Department and the Clinton Machine will be for historians to determine. Personally, however, I can't imagine a man of James Comey's stature tolerating the fact that history will include obituaries of him that state in their opening paragraphs that he was the first Director of the FBI who took a fall – and now the second FBI Director in history to be fired!

© Joan Swirsky