By Chuck Warren

The Trump Department of Justice has indicted former FBI director James Comey. I am sure that Comey, the grandstanding, moral snob, and author of A Higher Loyalty, will do his best to say that his indictment is an indictment of democracy, which means that he is equal to democracy. His media partisans will try to win over public sympathy for him as a martyr for freedom. But let me give Comey one piece of advice: If you want the sympathy of American voters, maybe hire a lawyer who is not a legal drama villain.

Comey hired his old government friend and colleague, Patrick Fitzgerald, as his lawyer. The two are so similar that you would think they are brothers. Like Comey, Fitzgerald is also a cynical self-promoter who would do anything to serve himself but hide behind “public good” to justify himself. Two episodes expose him.

He first became prominent during the Plame Affair. There was a huge scandal during the George W. Bush administration. Joseph Wilson, an investigator, was a harsh critic of the administration over the Iraq policy. Someone inside the administration leaked to the press that his wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA officer and her cover was being a State Department official, which is as terrible a thing as you could do.

President Bush appointed Fitzgerald as a special counsel to investigate the leak. By this time, the media had already turned Vice President Dick Cheney into the administration’s villain and puppet master. To Fitzgerald, this meant he would become a political celebrity—who knows, maybe even president—if he got Cheney.

Instead of looking for the leaker and the truth, Fitzgerald went on a hunt to get Cheney, starting with his chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Libby was the biggest patriot you could ever meet. In 2003, he was the first person in the White House sounding the alarm on the Iraq War and advocating for a change of strategy. He didn’t care that this did not make him friends inside the administration because he thought that it was the right thing to do. But when Fitzgerald made him the target of his investigation, Libby was sidelined and eventually resigned. One can only imagine how many Americans would have stayed and not been killed in the war if Fitzgerald had not gone after Libby, and Libby had managed to convince the president to change strategy.

During the investigation, Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, told Fitzgerald that he had leaked Plame’s identity. Fitzgerald asked Armitage not to make this public. Imagine the sinisterness: Fitzgerald had the answer to conclude the investigation, but, instead of doing just that, he covered it up so he could frame the vice president of the United States.

Fitzgerald told Libby several times that, if he would “deliver” Cheney to him, he would let Libby off the hook. Libby refused to lie. Fitzgerald retaliated by trying to send him to prison. Libby had said that he was surprised when NBC anchor Tim Russert mentioned Plame was a CIA officer during a phone call. Russert testified that he could not remember mentioning her, but he might have. After months, he changed his testimony, claiming that he was certain that he did not mention it. Which is odd, because you tend to forget details of a conversation over time, not remember them. This is because Fitzgerald was working on planting a fake memory in his head to indict Libby.

Daniel L. Schacter is a prominent memory expert and psychology professor at Harvard. In his book, Seven Sins of Memory, about errors and failures of recalling events, he calls this suggestibility, which means that by repeating false information to your own or someone else’s memory, you convince them to remember something that never happened. Fitzgerald was doing that.

He also did that with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Fitzgerald first asked Miller to testify as a witness. When she refused to reveal her sources, as a good journalist should, Fitzgerald indicted her and got her sentenced to 18 months in prison. (Comey’s partisans will cry for freedom of the press, but someone should ask them about his lawyer’s treatment of a good journalist.) Miller spent 85 days in prison until she agreed to reveal her source.

Miller testified that Libby had told her about Plame’s identity. This was based on four words in her notes from 2003 about Wilson, Plame’s husband: “Wife works in bureau?” Miller published a memoir in 2016, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey. In it, she said that Fitzgerald had asked her leading questions to misremember events, leading her to her false testimony. She also admitted that Libby could not possibly have tried to out Plame by saying that she works in the “bureau” because the State Department is organized by bureaus, while the CIA is categorized by divisions. If Libby wanted to out her, he would have said she “works in a division.” But her inaccurate testimony allowed Fitzgerald to indict Libby for lying under oath about having learned from Russert that Plame was a CIA officer.

If this is confusing, let me sum it up:

  • Armitage leaked Plame’s identity.

  • Fitzgerald told him to stay silent to get Cheney by threatening Libby with an indictment.

  • Libby had said that he first learned from Russert that Plame was a CIA officer.

  • Fitzgerald planted memories in Russert’s and Miller’s heads, that Russert never mentioned Plame to Libby, and Libby had outed Plame to Miller.

  • He also put a good journalist in prison for being a good journalist, violating the First Amendment regarding the freedom of the press.

  • All to make a name for himself by being the guy who took down Cheney.

In 2018, President Donald Trump commendably issued a full pardon for Libby, undoing an injustice.

But let’s be fair to Fitzgerald. He is not hungry for putting people in prison. He sometimes lets off his targets. For example, he investigated Larry Nassar for sexual abuse and cleared him. Nassar was investigated for a second time by someone else, and he is now serving his 235-year prison sentence for sexual abuse, including of minors, and possession of minor porn.

Nassar was the team doctor for Michigan State University’s women’s gymnastics team between 1996 and 2016 and USA Gymnastics between 1996 and 2014. As early as 1997, female athletes had accused him of sexual abuse.

You can read a detailed version of everything Nassar did here. But I’ll cite some of the examples:

In 1994, he began sexually abusing a gymnast, who later would become an Olympic medalist. The abuse continued for six years.

In 1998, Nassar began sexually abusing the six–year–old daughter of a family friend. She later tells police Nassar penetrated her vagina with his fingers “every other week for five years”.

In 2000, Rachael Denhollander, a gymnast who later would file a criminal complaint against Nassar, says she was sexually abused by Nassar during treatments for lower back pain. She was 15 at the time.

In 2004, Nassar received or attempted to receive images of child pornography, according to a federal indictment unsealed in 2016.

In 2014, Michigan State hired Fitzgerald, who had retired from government by then, to investigate Nassar. He concluded the investigation by telling the Michigan attorney general, “We believe the evidence will show that no MSU official believed Nassar committed sexual abuse prior to newspaper reports in late summer 2016.” But he never produced a written report. After Nassar’s corruption became clear, Fitzgerald defended his work: “It is clear that Nassar fooled everyone around him—patients, friends, colleagues, and fellow doctors at MSU.” Which is mind boggling. In investigating Nassar, apparently, he only talked to people who liked the guy, but not the victims! The best thing you can say about the guy is that he is just a terrible investigator.

But as we see in the Libby episode, he is actually very good at getting what he wants. But I guess he just did not really want to send a pedophile to prison. Harsh on patriots, soft on pedophiles: I present to you, Mr. Comey’s defense attorney.

And out of all the lawyers in the world, Comey has decided to pick this awful man, filled with virtues, to represent him. It is as if they want us to root against them.

Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.