Was Comey the First Purge Victim?

By Scott Horton

An anonymous assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York recounts an insider’s view of the rise of James Comey, and how he came to exercise de facto control over the Department of Justice at the end of the Ashcroft era. It seems that Comey understood what the White House was up to and steadily resisted the political corruption of the Department of Justice.

Comey was effectively running DOJ and . . .  Ashcroft was off at his farm in Virginia doing the planning work for his next job, and taking care of his health. Certainly, Comey became the guy with his finger in the dike trying to hold back the worst of the WH power grab and trying to protect his beloved DOJ from the unethical assault that was to come.

. . .

Question, why did he leave? We can all see why he might want to leave, it must have been incredibly draining to be the only meaningful pushback against the WH and the Rovians. But why did he leave? Maybe, just maybe

. . .

Was he the first one purged? Was the purge of James B. Comey the necessary beginning of the larger purges to come?

Follow up question for the still open Comey testimony record.

Were you asked to resign? If so, by whom? Where did you believe that idea originated?

James Comey is impressive on a number of counts. He reminds us that there were dedicated, professional Republicans at work in the Department of Justice (indeed, John McKay, Carol Lam, David Iglesias and Paul Charlton would all also fall into that category) and that Karl Rove hated every last one of them. They stood in the way of a Rovian plan to control the mechanisms of the criminal justice system and bend them for partisan purposes. And in the end they had to be removed.

As Aristotle writes in the Politics: “It is of the intrinsic character of the tyrant that he works to insure that his subjects everywhere are spied upon so that nothing of their dealings is a secret from him;… and he conspires always to set men against their own friends, the common people against the privileged and the wealthy, and so forth. And he will ruin the treasury to pay the military… levying great fiscal burdens upon his people; and finally, constantly does he foment war, to provide the matrix in which his power expands and every challenge of his misdeeds may be called treason.” “But no virtuous man will find success in such a reign.”