The New York Times has a review up of James Comey's new book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.
If we can rely on the review as an accurate portrayal of the book, it is one strange book.
The reviewer Michiko Kakutani tells us:
The volume offers little in the way of hard news revelations about investigations by the F.B.I. or the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III (not unexpectedly, given that such investigations are ongoing and involve classified material), and it lacks the rigorous legal analysis that made Jack Goldsmith’s 2007 book “The Terror Presidency” so incisive about larger dynamics within the Bush administration.But it appears to provide numerous commentary that one would think would come out of the mind of a bad mystery novelist:
He notices, for instance, “the soft white pouches under” Trump’s “expressionless blue eyes”; coyly observes that the president’s hands are smaller than his own “but did not seem unusually so”; and points out that he never saw Trump laugh — a sign, Comey suspects, of his “deep insecurity, his inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humor of others, which, on reflection, is really very sad in a leader, and a little scary in a president.”...Comey is blunt about what he thinks of the president, comparing Trump’s demand for loyalty over dinner to “Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony — with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man.’”In the end, it appears that we will learn more about Comey than Trump from this book and that what we learn is that Comey has a distorted Maltese Falcon-style vision of the world. Is this the way he operated when he was with the FBI?
Do other FBI agents think in this bizarre fashion?
-Robert Wenzel
Apparently it didn't cross his mind that he just isn't funny. I think he just has ego envy.
ReplyDeleteAs Stone said, Comey took 2 years to review 30,000 emails of Hilary's on the bathroom server; then claimed to have reviewed 300,000 emails of Hilary's (that Huma had forwarded to a Yahoo account) in only 2 days.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to his observation that Trump's demand for loyalty reminded him of a Mafia don: On MSNBC last night, the idiotic talking-heads actually took that literally, and were seriously weighing whether Mueller will or should enlarge his investigation in order to investigate that. I was falling out of my chair with laughter.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what else Robert Mueller does all day? I wonder since the US political structure doesn't really lend itself to an opposition faction backers interests being met, the special prosecutor effectively does that function until that party gets control of a senate or the house.
Delete"With regard to his observation that Trump's demand for loyalty reminded him of a Mafia don: On MSNBC last night, the idiotic talking-heads actually took that literally, and were seriously weighing whether Mueller will or should enlarge his investigation in order to investigate that."
DeleteI wish they would (enlarge his investigation). Perhaps it would serve to enlighten many(some?) as to the mafia-like nature of government.