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Some of James Comey’s best friends are Jewish (legal scholars)

[additional-authors]
June 8, 2017
Former FBI Director James Comey testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington, D.C., on June 8. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

We now know that James Comey, the FBI director President Donald Trump fired last month, thinks the president is a liar. (It’s mutual, by the way.)

Asked in Senate testimony Thursday why he wrote memos immediately after each conversation he had with Trump regarding the FBI’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Comey said: “I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting so I thought it important to document.”

We also know that in order to make that case — he surely anticipated making that case in some forum, although perhaps not as dramatically as he did Thursday, testifying to the Senate — he twice confided in friends who happened to be a) legal scholars and b) Jewish.

Comey, a longtime Washington insider, has proved expert at shaping the narrative, and never more so than when it comes to the investigation. (Trump has said Comey’s handling of the investigation is one reason he fired Comey.)

It’s not just Comey’s dramatic opening statement released Wednesday, describing awkward moments when Trump appeared to be pressuring him to drop the investigation. The release drowned out what might have been a good news moment for Trump, nominating as Comey’s successor Christopher Wray, a former top Justice Department official respected across party lines.

Comey had left a careful paper trail, taking notes immediately following his meetings with Trump — and conveying to his friends his concerns.

Trump’s private lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, was furious and called for an investigation in a press conference after Comey’s testimony was completed. “Today, Mr. Comey admitted that he leaked to friends of his purported memos of those privileged communications,” he said, although Trump said previously that he would not claim executive privilege when it comes to his communications with Comey.

Last month a dramatic New York Times story that first revealed the lengths Comey took to keep Trump at a distance included on-the-record comment from Benjamin Wittes, who described a lunch he had with Comey around the time Comey was most intensely feeling Trump’s pressure. Wittes says he did not speak to the Times at Comey’s behest, but Wittes’ description of the March 27 lunch made it clear that Comey had concerns about Trump in real time, and not just in the wake of his firing.

“He had to throw some brushback pitches to the administration,” Wittes told the Times, referring to Comey’s efforts to get Trump and his aides to stop making inappropriate requests.

Wittes, the Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and the editor of the influential Lawfare blog, has said he and Comey are meet-now-and-then-for-lunch friends, but not close friends. He is married to Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior Middle East scholar at Brookings. (In 2010, Wittes, discussing airport security, recalled, bemused, how his bad Jewish day school Hebrew got him an exemption from a security line at Ben Gurion airport.)

Comey revealed in his testimony Thursday that in an another instance he leaked information to a friend in order to push back against Trump’s intimations — post-firing — that Comey could be embarrassed should the content of their conversations be revealed. (Trump had tweeted that Comey had better hope there were no tapes of the conversations; on Thursday, Comey drew laughter when he said, “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”) Comey delivered his friend his private notes of the meetings taken immediately after one of his interactions. He explained why:

“My judgment was, I need to get [his memo] out into the public square,” he said. “I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter.”

Asked who the friend was, he said: “A close friend who is a professor at Columbia law school.”

Twitter soon identified the friend as Daniel Richman, and the Washington Post called Richman, who confirmed it, but would not add anything more.

Wittes has not said how he and Comey became friends, nor has Richman, although both men were federal prosecutors in New York around the same time.

What we do know is that Comey, an Irish Catholic born in New York and raised in New Jersey, was close to Jewish organizations throughout his FBI career, and has been enormously affected by the lessons of the Holocaust.

His final speech as FBI director was to the Anti-Defamation League, the week he was fired.

“I believe the Holocaust is the most significant event in human history. And I mean significant in two different ways,” he said in that speech. “It is, of course, significant because it was the most horrific display of inhumanity—one that simply defies words and challenges meaning. How could such a thing happen? How is it consistent with the concept of a loving God?”

Then, he added how the Holocaust informed his deeply held beliefs about preventing the abuse of power.

“I also believe the Holocaust was the most significant event in history not just because it was a display of inhumanity, but because it was also the most horrific display of our humanity—our true capacity for evil and for moral surrender,” he said. “And that second significance is the reason we require every new FBI special agent and intelligence analyst in training to visit the Holocaust Museum. We want them to learn about abuse of power on a breathtaking scale.”

Two other Jewish scholars, meanwhile, were duking it out at Twitter over whether what Comey was describing amounted to Trump obstructing justice.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard University constitutional law expert, has argued that Trump’s right as an executive to fire Comey (and other officials) meant that the firing could not be construed as obstruction:

Norm Eisen, who had been ethics lawyer in the Obama administration, disagreed, saying that if Trump acted with “corrupt intent,” he could be liable:

Trump’s son, Donald Jr., was excited that Dersh was ostensibly defending his Dad (although Dershowitz has also consistently said he believes Trump has been unwise.)

Trump Jr., who has had his own brushes with the alt-right, likely is referring to Dershowitz’s reputation as a liberal when he calls the scholar “not exactly the alt right.” Of course, Dershowitz’s well-known commitment to Judaism also would make him less than comfortable in those precincts.

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