1/ COMEY AND STRZOK'S ORIGINAL SIN:

Mid Year Exam

Thread

2/ On May 8, 2017, Rod Rosenstein drafted a letter explaining why firing James Comey, less than halfway through his 10 year term, made sense.

Rod said: "I cannot defend the Director's handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton's emails..."

3/ "...and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgement that he was mistaken. Almost everyone agrees that the Director made serious mistakes."

That is extremely strong language coming from a current Deputy AG to a former Deputy AG.

DOJ is a club

4/ Rod goes on to describe specific cases where Comey "sinned" per DOJ's policies. These are law men after all.

But Comey is a boy scout. What was it about the Clinton email investigation (called Mid Year Exam internally) tripped him up?

Everything

5/ To start with, FBI employees are generally conservative. Comey himself identified as a Republican for a long time, so did Strzok. So once questions started getting raised about Hillary's private server, Comey probably knew he would have to actually do something about it...

6/ If only just to keep his image positive among his employees and not start whispers about him being politicized by DC

And maybe he and other FBI execs OVER estimated their ability to stay above the political fray

7/ The way Strzok describes it, the start of MYE was: "A perfect storm of Randy (Coleman) and John (Giacalone) bluster, with political background"

Randy and John are FBI execs in the National Security Branch

They thought they could open Pandoras Box and close it again

8/ Well, nothing about this case was normal. First of all, it was run as an "HQ Special" using staff & resources from an FBI field office but working & making decisions out of HQ

Really the right field office to run this case would be New York, since the server was in Chappaqua

9/ But I imagine that was nixed because there is underlying tension between FBI HQ and FBI NY. Maybe FBI NY might have gone TOO HARD on Clinton

So it comes back to Comey. He is the point person with congress and to be fair, it's probably all that they ask him about

10/ Of course, the way the FBI is supposed to operate is "I can not confirm or deny the existence of an FBI investigation" and Strzok even went to great lengths to LIMIT distribution of information about the case

He was trying to keep the case normal

11/ But it was all pointless because the Clinton campaign made a political decision and confirmed *their own investigation*

I guess they wanted to fight fire with fire, so again, there went normalcy

12/ Strzok and his team received a huge dump of emails from Hillary and her legal team. But once the FBI started looking, they found emails not originally submitted by HRC in all kinds of places & had all kinds of new revelations about the server

I don't think anyone expected it

13/ Plus, all kinds of concerning signals from the White House and DOJ

-Loretta Lynch telling Comey to not call it an investigation but rather call it a "matter"

-Obama going on 60 minutes and saying "This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered”

14/
-The still secret email where Lynch supposedly assured a senior Clinton campaign staffer named Amanda Renteria that the email probe would not dive too deep

-And finally, the Clinton-Lynch tarmac meeting

15/ It was so bad that the Mid Year team seriously considered appointing a Special Counsel for the case. Strzok even emailed Lisa Page the DOJ policy guidance on appointing a Special Counsel. This was in March 2016

But they don't do it. Comey takes it on his shoulders

16/ All of this was occurring under an understanding that, due to the high profile and large congressional interest in the case, all of the 302s were going to be requested the second the case finishes.

And eventually were going to become public due to FOIA

17/ This plus the shocking carelessness that HRC displayed (and now the FBI had uncovered) added up to trouble

There was no great way out of this. So Comey broke all the rules (as Rod dutifully noted) and blazed his own path.

He puts on a brave face these days, justifying it

18/ But deep down I think he knows that he sinned and feels terrible about it.

Really, Comey having a pit in his stomach explains so much of his actions afterwards

19/ After that personal threshold has been crossed, and Neibuhr now disapproves of him, what happens next is just noise

We underestimate the role of wives in these pressure filled situations. Did Comey's wife ever chime in on his handling of Mid Year?

20/ We know how Strzok's wife felt.

In one of the saddest parts of his texts he talks about fighting with his wife on 2016 election night, as the vote totals turned to Trump, what were they arguing about?

21/ "the Bu (FBI) and Clinton"

Strzok: "Told her twice she was either calling me stupid or a liar"

Even SHE thought the Clinton case was mishandled

Very sad

22/ Mid Year ate Comey and Strzok up. By the end they had something to "atone for"

Strzok even references this feeling:
"I personally have a sense of unfinished business. I unleashed it with MYE. Now I need to fix and finish it"

23/ Also Strzok:
"I see a solid, unbroken line from mye to announcement to [redacted] to election to momentus this [redacted]"

unbroken line

It's all rolled together even though Lisa Page says the cases were completely different in her testimony

24/ However, I don't consider this part of the true origins of #spygate. Rather, it's an explanation of how otherwise level headed people like Comey and Strzok went so far sideways. How they got swept up in a wave.

25/ I don't think either of these men are evil. In fact, casting them that way is a boon to the true villains of the story. In many ways, Comey and Strzok were thrown under the bus.

26/ And because both of them have an inflated view of themselves, they actually kind of enjoyed the attention (at first). It was like they were acting out a movie.

Comey briefing the president elect alone

Strzok seeing his investigative work in the New York Times

27/ But in fact, they were treated as pawns and then sacrificial lambs when the time was right

Fitting fate for those who have sinned