The RNC’s new Lyin’ Comey website, explained

Lyin’ Comey, a new website from the Republican National Committee, complete with a splash page trying to sign you up for email spam from the RNC and the Trump campaign, is live this morning. It constitutes a fairly unprecedented high-profile presidential attack on a private citizen. It is also deeply rooted in multilayered bad faith.

The occasion for the rollout is that former FBI Director James Comey is on the cusp of releasing a new book and is undertaking the associated media publicity campaign.

Comey is thought to have unflattering things to say about the president, so the president’s team is now trying to discredit him. Interestingly, though, the Lyin’ Comey site does not really dedicate much attention (if any) to rebutting anything in particular Comey said about Trump.

Instead, its main focus is pointing out that between October 2016 and Comey’s firing in May 2017, Democrats had a lot of mean things to say about him.

This is certainly true. Democrats had (and continue to have) many complaints about Comey’s conduct during the 2016 presidential campaign, up to and including the fact that he kept the existence and extent of the still-ongoing FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Russian government under wraps. Comey is neither a saint nor above criticism.

The RNC isn’t going to try to seriously convince anyone that Democrats’ complaints about his handling of Hillary Clinton’s emails is their beef with Comey, but they are hoping that they can persuade the press they care in hopes of muddying the waters — ideally generating some infighting on the left.

Lyin’ Comey rehearses Trump’s fake rationale for firing Comey

On May 9, 2017, the distinguished (though at times controversial) law enforcement career of FBI Director James Comey came to an abrupt end when Donald Trump fired him. The official rationale, provided in a memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, was that Comey had mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation that dominated the 2016 campaign in a way that was unfair to her.

This rationale had the convenient property of lining up with what many Democrats had said, though, inconveniently, it didn’t seem remotely believable that it was Trump’s real reason.

Trump himself, conveniently, cleared this up a few days later in a nationally televised interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt. Holt, sensibly, asked Trump if this wasn’t really about the Russia investigation. And Trump confirmed that the firing was, in fact, about Russia and Rosenstein’s memo was a pretext rather than a reason:

But regardless of the recommendation, I was going to fire Comey. Knowing there was no good time to do it! And in fact when I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said, “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”

The RNC’s Lyin’ Comey site essentially ignores Trump’s confession that his goal was to stymie the Russia investigation and instead doubles down on the pretext. Its centerpiece is a video montage of Democrats complaining about Comey’s treatment of Clinton, embellished with various pull quotes and social media share buttons.

It’s clear this isn’t actually why Trump fired Comey — Trump himself said so. And it’s also clear that “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia” is not, in fact, “a made-up story.” The investigation Trump tried to quash has already led to multiple criminal convictions and several ongoing prosecutions.

Democrats’ complaints with James Comey

While these GOP attacks are bad-faith nonsense, it is true that over the course of the 2016 campaign, Democrats developed multiple grievances about Comey and his conduct at the FBI.

• They started with Comey’s July 2016 press conference at which he said no charges would be brought against Clinton over the email server matter, but nonetheless slammed her conduct as “extremely careless.” It’s highly unusual for an investigator to editorialize in a negative way about the subject of an investigation whom he has just cleared, and Comey seemed to be more concerned with conservative reaction to his decision than with normal legal procedure.
• Then came Comey’s October surprise letter announcing the discovery of new evidence in the case, evidence that turned out to not actually be new (or, indeed, really evidence) but rather simply additional copies of emails that had already been reviewed.
• There’s a credible statistical case that Comey’s letter made a big enough difference to cost Clinton the election.
• It has since become clear that the FBI was looking into Trump-Russia issues during the 2016 campaign, thanks to some unwise remarks by Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos — information that Comey chose to keep hidden from the public even as he claimed to have no choice but to keep Congress informed of every beat in the Clinton email matter.

From conversations I had with House and Senate Democrats during the final two weeks of the 2016 campaign, this added up to enough anger that many of them believed Comey deserved to be fired. The overwhelming consensus was that Clinton, whom they all expected to win the election, would not fire him, since to fire the FBI director as political payback would be unthinkable and cause a massive backlash.

Of course, Trump won and proceeded to govern in a less cautious way that did, in fact, generate blowback in the form of Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel.

The Russia investigation is not a “made-up story”

The central contention of Trump’s actual case against Comey was that the Russia investigation he was overseeing was a “made-up story” being pushed by sore loser Democrats. If Republicans had evidence that was true, that would constitute a powerful rebuttal to Comey’s view that he was attempting to lead with integrity only to be fired by a president who lacks it.

But they do not, in fact, have such evidence because it pretty clearly isn’t true.

• For starters, it’s now abundantly clear that the Russian effort to help Trump win the election was very real and multifaceted, whether or not it involved any wrongdoing (criminal or otherwise) by anyone on the Trump campaign.
• The investigation into that campaign has already led to criminal indictments of several Russian persons or entities, as well as American sanctions against the Russian government.
• It’s also exposed possible criminal wrongdoing by both former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (who has pleaded guilty) and Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort (who has not), as well as secondary figures including Papadopoulos and deputy campaign manager Rick Gates.

Comey led an investigation into real crimes, Trump fired him to try to block the investigation, the firing backfired and the investigation continued, and because it has continued, criminal wrongdoing has come to light.

That’s the basic story. It’s all essentially indisputable, which is why the RNC is resorting to what amounts to a large-scale trolling tactic as part of its larger effort to help Trump try to stymie the investigation.

None of this makes sense on the merits, but conservatives have proven over the years that their narratives don’t need to make logical sense to be taken seriously by the media. What’s more, the broad progressive tent contains a fairly wide diversity of opinions about the FBI as an institution, and highlighting past Democratic criticisms of Comey serves to heighten those tensions.

There is, on the one hand, an impulse in Democratic quarters to cast their party as defenders of the honor and integrity of federal law enforcement as it comes under attack from the GOP, and on the other hand a counter-impulse to join in the pile-on against an agency that the left has long criticized for a wide range of misconduct.

The idea that one could substitute trolling attacks on Democrats for a substantive defense of Trump on the merits might seem far-fetched, but, of course, it proved to be a fairly effective campaign tactic for the GOP in 2016.

That those tactics were largely based on the hacked Russian emails that are at the center of the investigation that got Comey fired is, itself, in some ways ironic. But if a thrice-married billionaire who lives in a gold-plated condo in Manhattan can become the leader of culturally conservative rural populist movement, then we’re long past worrying about irony.