It’s Time to Impeach James Comey
Every federal official is accountable for his conduct—even the ones who are appointed rather than elected.
The Founders, in their wisdom, provided the power of impeachment to serve as a check on renegade federal bureaucrats as well as elected officials. Impeachment is called for when “high crimes and misdemeanors” have been committed by public officials. These do not have to be crimes that land a man in prison. They can be political crimes, crimes against the duties of one’s office. The penalty upon conviction is not a federal penitentiary but permanent exile from public service so the public never again can be victimized by his perfidy. (If a public official has committed a legal crime as well as a political one, he is subject to trial in criminal court after impeachment proceedings have concluded.)
It is time for Congress to use this constitutional remedy to remove from the body politic the cancer that FBI Director James Comey has become.
Comey once had a reputation as a straight-shooter, an apolitical servant of justice who would follow the evidence wherever it led and prosecute those who deserved it regardless of wealth or status. Well, you can forget all about that. Comey has disgraced himself and his agency by shredding beyond repair the once sterling reputation he and the FBI once enjoyed.
In Comey’s press conference reporting on the results of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s sordid email scandal, he spent 12 minutes rehearsing for the American people a litany of her crimes against statutory obligations to protect the nation’s classified information. Then he spent the last three minutes saying never mind and inventing a new legal standard—”intent”—that appears nowhere in the statutes she broke.
Then he participated in a scheme to grant immunity from prosecution, even for destruction of evidence, to all five members of the Clinton Crime Cabal, who conspired together to destroy evidence, bleach servers, and hammer Blackberries into tiny fragments to conceal obviously guilty behavior.
Immunity is usually granted in exchange for testimony against bigger fish in the food chain. In other words, immunity is usually granted to bring evidence to light. But in Comey’s case, it is being used to bury evidence in the depths of the deepest parts of the sea. All the people with guilty knowledge, beginning with Ms. Clinton herself, have now been effectively acquitted by the man entrusted with the responsibility to put them behind bars.
In this abysmal affair, Comey and his minions granted immunity to the guilty in exchange for precisely nothing. He gave them each a get-out-of-jail-free card, exempting them from prosecution and leading to their cheeky and contemptuous refusal to answer any questions about their potential work in compromising the nation’s secrets.
We have since discovered that this entire cover-up was likely engineered to protect the president himself, who used a pseudonym—why would you even do that unless you had something to hide?—to send classified information to Ms. Clinton at an obviously non-secure email address. If Hillary was going down, she could take the president with her, and Comey wasn’t going to let that happen.
The biblical standard of justice is unmistakably clear. “He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the just, both of them are abomination to the Lord” (Prov. 17:15).
The word “abomination” in Hebrew connotes an inner and instinctive revulsion, a moral gag reflex in the face of evil. When the guilty are let off the hook, it is an affront not only to the American people and our Constitution, but to God Himself.
James Comey has seven years left in his term of office. If he is not removed from that post through impeachment, he will work his pernicious will to insulate a liberal administration from accountability and to bedevil and undermine a conservative one.
The psalmist asks the question, “If the foundations are broken, what can the righteous do?” (Ps. 11:3). Well, they can start by doing something about this corrupt man who heads up the FBI.
Congress can and should punish this man—who has turned justifying the wicked into an art form—by impeaching him, convicting him and banishing him forever from public service. And the sooner the better. {eoa}
Bryan Fischer is host of the two-hour weekday “Focal Point” program on American Family Radio.
