Trump, Clinton, Comey: No Success Like Failure (Free Article)

During their second debate of the 2016 general-election campaign, Donald Trump boiled over because one of the two moderators didn’t devote as much time to asking about Hillary Clinton’s emails as was spent questioning him about his “grab ’em by the pussy” remark on an old Access Hollywood tape that had come to light just two days earlier.

Addressing CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he demanded, “I’d like to know, Anderson, why aren’t you bringing up the emails?”

“We brought up the emails,” Mr. Cooper said and repeated the question he had just asked about health care.

“One on three!” Mr. Trump howled in protest. He couldn’t have sounded more like a whiny 11-year-old if he punctuated the sentiment by crying, “No fair!”

Comey Changed the Dynamic

He reinforced that impression of him by spending too much time during their third and final debate refusing to say that, after months of claiming the vote was rigged, he would accept the results of the election. But then, just as it was beginning to seem inevitable that he would have to, on Oct. 28 then-FBI Director James Comey announced that he was reopening the probe into Ms. Clinton’s emails after a laptop her longtime aide, Huma Abedin, shared with her husband, Anthony Weiner, surfaced during a probe of Mr. Weiner’s criminal sexting of a teenager.

Abruptly, the dynamic of the contest was transformed. Over the next week, the polling site FiveThirtyEight showed a decline in Ms. Clinton’s lead in swing states from an average of 4.5 percent to 1.7 percent. That shift more than likely was replicated in the actual returns, and during the nine days between Mr. Comey’s announcement and his subsequent statement two days before Election Day that nothing incriminating had been found, 28 million votes were cast in states that permitted early balloting.

Amid the whirlwind of changes that ensued, Ms. Clinton and the man she perhaps blames most for her defeat, Mr. Comey, came to share one thing in common: best-selling memoirs whose prime hook is their account of that pivotal part of the campaign.

And the one constant through all the turmoil is that Mr. Trump has remained the same whiny boy who was on display during that middle debate. The obvious difference is that he has a lot more leverage over the U.S. Department of Justice than he did over Mr. Cooper and his co-moderator, Martha Raddatz of ABC-TV.

That was why on May 21, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein acceded to the President’s demand that it open an inquiry into the FBI’s probe of his campaign’s contacts with Russian operatives, with a particular focus on an informant who spoke to three of his campaign advisers, which Mr. Trump claimed was evidence that the administration of President Obama had sought to undermine his campaign.

It was hard to see how the informant’s work was proof of such political meddling, rather than an attempt by the FBI to determine whether the Trump campaign had broken the law by collaborating on strategy with a foreign government hostile to this country.

But Mr. Rosenstein clearly felt backed into a corner by America’s Bully: he could not be sure that, if he refused by claiming that granting Mr. Trump’s request would undermine the Justice Department’s independence, the President wouldn’t use it as a pretext to fire him and perhaps Special Counsel Robert Mueller as well. So to avoid a Monday Afternoon Massacre with echoes of Watergate, Mr. Rosenstein yielded to the unreasonable demand, apparently believing that if the Mueller investigation continued, it would eventually produce results that outweighed the damage done to DOJ in the short term.

Bristled at Being ‘Extorted’

A month earlier, after some critical tweets by Mr. Trump and House Republican diehards drafting articles of impeachment aimed at Mr. Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General responded, “There have been people who have been making threats, privately and publicly, against me for some time. And I think they should understand by now, the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.”

Yet he backed down rather than call Mr. Trump’s bluff, and agreed to let Republican congressional leaders see some of the most highly-classified information pertaining to the Russia investigation after previously contending that the material could be weaponized to undercut Mr. Mueller’s inquiry.

It was as if Mr. Trump, having grown bored with his presidency being compared to “The Manchurian Candidate,” opted to mash up the script with that of another 1962 movie classic, “Cape Fear,” in which an amoral psychopath played by Robert Mitchum hatched a revenge plot against the lawyer played by Gregory Peck who he was convinced—with some justification—had betrayed him.

But in contrast to Mr. Mitchum’s chillingly cool portrayal, the President seemed motivated by a growing fever at what lay ahead for him. Five days before the showdown, Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly took a position diametrically opposed to the Trumpeniks on the House’s panel.

‘Russian Effort to Interfere’

During a committee hearing May 16, FBI Director Christopher Wray reaffirmed his belief that Mr. Mueller’s probe was not a “witch hunt.” Mr. Burr, referring to the conclusion by American intelligence agencies at the end of the Obama Administration that Moscow favored Mr. Trump in the 2016 election, said in a statement that day, “Committee staff have spent 14 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft and analytic work, and we see no reason to dispute the conclusions. There is no doubt that Russia undertook an unprecedented effort to interfere with our 2016 elections.”

Even that high-ranking Republican’s assessment wasn’t going to cut through the Fox News fog, but it surely rattled Mr. Trump. Whether it was because he didn’t know how much Mr. Mueller had or because he had a pretty good idea how much his aides had done wasn’t clear. But his putting Mr. Rosenstein up against the wall and threatening the rule of law with his assault on the Justice Department’s independence was the act of a man who had lost what little respect he previously showed for the American system of checks and balances.

Neither Richard Nixon nor Bill Clinton in their resistance to special prosecutors went to the extreme of demanding a probe of their probers. But both men spent much of their adult lives working in government, which imbued them with a certain respect for the system that Mr. Trump lacks.

Yet each of them has served, ironically, as a negative example for Mr. Trump’s benefit. Mr. Nixon’s downfall offered lessons in what not to do—principally not to go quietly, counting on a belief that your legacy may someday be salvaged. Mr. Clinton’s sexual dalliances gave Mr. Trump some armor against his own bad behavior in that area: trying to argue that his misbehavior was worse than his predecessor’s doesn’t accomplish much more than establish gradations of ickiness in the era of #MeToo.

Uneasy Déjà Vu for Hillary

Perhaps this is why Mr. Trump’s contempt is greater for Hillary Clinton than for Bill, although that may simply be a product of his misogyny. The two presidential rivals’ joined-at-the-hip status was reinforced by the presence of both of them highlighting events on Long Island May 23: Mr. Trump at a speech on immigration in Bethpage that served as another screed against an easy target, the MS-13 gang, Ms. Clinton as the keynote speaker of the State Democratic Convention at Hofstra University.

In her case, the venue had to be a bit jarring: Hofstra had hosted the first presidential debate, the most-watched one in American history, which was the occasion of the first of three clear triumphs over Mr. Trump. Unfortunately, the debates were the only places during the fall campaign where it could be said definitively that she came fully prepared. And just as importantly, if not more so, that she actually came.

For those watching, her command of the facts, and her rhetorical flourishes at Mr. Trump’s expense, were defining, particularly since his most-notable moment came when he hovered over her midway through the second debate. But it was as if she had convinced herself that she simply needed to seem the stronger candidate when they shared the same stage, as if unaware that he had sputtered his way through the Republican primary debates and it hadn’t mattered at all to the voters who gave him the party’s nomination without much equivocation.

Her memoir, “What Happened,” never cleared up why she didn’t spend more time campaigning in key swing states, even as it devoted so much time to blaming a multitude of forces and people, from Mr. Comey and Bernie Sanders voters to her coverage in the New York Times and Vladimir Putin’s belief that a Trump presidency would better serve his interests.

Came Off Contemptuous

She admitted to verbal blunders that hurt her badly with white voters, from her “basket of deplorables” remark at a private fund-raiser, to the CNN town hall in which she apparently expected people would realize that she was talking about coal manufacturers rather than workers when she said that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

But the woman who prided herself on being a wonk and tried to compensate for her shortcomings as a candidate by outworking those who had a gift for electrifying a crowd—from Barack Obama to Mr. Trump to her husband—seemed to have forgotten lessons from her first campaign for office. She easily overcame charges that she was a carpetbagger when she ran for U.S. Senate in New York in 2000 because she traveled the whole state trying to convince voters that she cared about the lives of people far removed from the city or her comfortable new life in Chappaqua.

The day after she lost the Michigan primary to Bernie Sanders—despite a poll issued on the morning of the vote showing her with a 13-point lead—her most prominent labor supporter, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten shrugged it off by noting that Ms. Clinton had campaigned only in Detroit and Flint. It seemed a reasonable inference to draw that she would be all over the state in the general election, but she didn’t campaign there at all, instead focusing her energies on states like Georgia and Arizona, where she ran better than past Democrats but didn’t win. That strategy allowed Mr. Trump to penetrate the “Blue Wall” of states that had long been keys to Democratic presidential wins.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had pushed through more-restrictive voting laws aimed at depressing Democratic turnout, particularly among minorities, yet Ms. Clinton didn’t visit the state the entire campaign, apparently convinced that the algorithm relied on by her campaign manager, Robby Mook, was a reliable barometer of success there. She did so in spite of the reported entreaties of Bill Clinton for her to get out and push harder for white working-class votes. The fact that whites made up 70 percent of those who cast ballots was telling. And Ms. Clinton’s rationale for her losing the vote among white women to Mr. Trump—that she did a point better than Mr. Obama did in 2012—was further proof that really smart people sometimes say incredibly dumb things.

Obsessed With Comey

Among them is her whaling away at the FBI Director who played such a large role in her defeat. Reviewing “What Happened” in The Times, Jennifer Senior described it as “a rant against James B. Comey, Bernie Sanders, the media, James B. Comey, Vladimir Putin and James B. Comey.”

In the memoir, Ms. Clinton expressed the conviction that on Oct. 27, 2016, victory was firmly in her grasp, and that it began slipping away the following day, when Mr. Comey announced he was reopening the investigation because of the emails that turned up on the Weiner/Abedin laptop.

There is strong circumstantial evidence to support her. What she doesn’t explain, though, is her lackluster efforts over the last 11 days of the campaign to try to compensate for the damage by convincing voters that based on past records, platforms and character, she offered them more reason to hope for better conditions in America than Mr. Trump.

Mr. Comey’s unprecedented intrusion by an FBI Director in the final stages of an election should have added to her sense of urgency and cut through any sense of overconfidence she was feeling based on her opponent’s stumbles and the devastating “Access Hollywood” tape. There’s no evidence that it did; the woman who took pride in her penchant for grinding it out didn’t seem to want to win as badly as Mr. Trump, who had been mentally lazy his entire life but campaigned in the closing days as if determined, at the least, not to be embarrassed by the margin if he lost.

Yet if Ms. Clinton’s logic is as wobbly as her campaign in its closing days, Mr. Comey is arguably worse in his attempt to balance the equities as he explains in his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” why he felt compelled to announce the reopening of the probe of her emails but remained silent about an investigation launched three months earlier into possible collaboration between Russian interests and the Trump campaign.

Stunningly Bad Judgment

“I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win,” he wrote. “I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption...It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in the polls.”

He would justify his decision to announce the reopening of the probe, even though it ultimately provided no new information that was damaging to her, by saying that he had told Republican congressional leaders, at the time in July that he announced the probe was completed, that if there were further developments, he would inform them.

His sense of proportion in deciding this was a reason to speak up about Ms. Clinton yet stay silent about the still-burgeoning Trump/Russia investigation is stunningly bad. By Mr. Comey’s own judgment, Ms. Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her use of the private email server while in the job of Secretary of State during Mr. Obama’s first term. “Extremely careless” amounts to spitting on the sidewalk when people in Mr. Trump’s camp were being scrutinized for possible treason in working with a foreign power to try to tilt the election.

Mr. Comey is not a stupid man, however much his hubris may have tripped him up. Mr. Rosenstein, in the memo making the case for firing him that Mr. Trump initially used to justify the dismissal before admitting that it was that “Russia thing” that motivated him, contended that the FBI Director had overstepped his authority with his initial pronouncement on the Clinton emails in July 2016, and then did it again by announcing the reopening of the investigation in late October. Mr. Comey may have been bothered by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s private meeting with Bill Clinton a few days before he released the July findings, but the appearance of impropriety—however much Ms. Lynch insisted they just exchanged pleasantries about grand-kids—didn’t give him license to supplant her as the chief spokesperson for the Justice Department.

Hearing Bullies’ Footsteps?

And in insisting on keeping his promise to GOP leaders in Congress about updates on the email probe while staying silent on the Russia investigation displayed such a skewed sense of priorities that it appears possible that he—just like Mr. Rosenstein this past week in more-pressurized circumstances—was bullied into a questionable decision.

In “A Higher Loyalty,” Mr. Comey wrote that aside from his taking such a prominent role in his first press conference on the Clinton emails, “I am convinced that if I could do it all again, I would do the same thing, given my role and what I knew at the time.”

That line suggests that, if Ms. Clinton following her stunning election defeat drowned her sorrows in many glasses of Chardonnay, Mr. Comey has done his drinking from a large bottle of denial.

In the final days of the campaign, facing an adverse development and feeling the weight on her shoulders, not only as a standard-bearer for women but as all that stood between the nation and a man she believed would be a disaster in too many ways to enumerate, Ms. Clinton figuratively shut herself down and hoped she would skate by.

Mr. Comey, wary of possible leaks from his agency, based on comments made by Rudy Giuliani several days before he announced the reopened probe because of the Weiner computer, made what amounted to an unforced error when he had two better courses: either disclose both investigations, or do what others in his position in the past had done and stay silent until after the ballots were counted.

The Spoils of Ineptitude

The wind-up is that we’ve got an unfit President lashing out in a desperate attempt to beat back the cops at his door, while the two people who played pivotal roles in his victory cash in on best-sellers made possible by decisions that should make them cringe for a long time.

It’s another of those many occasions in the Trump Era when a Bob Dylan lyric from more than 50 years ago seems written for the occasion: “there’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.”

We depend on the support of readers like you to help keep our publication strong and independent. Join us.