A Quote by Leon Panetta
My experience is that the director of the FBI is particularly important to just how aggressive an investigation will be into an issue. And once you remove James Comey, it creates a vacuum at the top. And the fundamental issue will be whether or not there is support at the highest levels within the FBI to continue to conduct that investigation. That's going to be the question mark.
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The most important thing to me is that the president Donald Trump fired the FBI director James Comey all because of the Russia investigation. That first justification given, again, the White House misleading the country about a major action the administration was taking, but the fact that they had a private conversation in which the president, by his own admission, was discussing the future of Director Comey in that job, and the president brings up whether he is under investigation, highly unethical, at a minimum, unethical.
I asked the former director James Comey about the FBI's intersections with Jeff Sessions prior to his stepping aside from the Russia investigation. Mr. Comey said his continued engagement with the Russian investigation was "problematic " and he said he could not discuss it in public.
There was certainly merit to the criticism that the deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein had about how James Comey handled the Hillary Clinton investigation. And I don't think Director Comey ever adequately explained why he treated the Clinton investigation one way and the Trump investigation another.
People elected Donald Trump because he acts decisively. He fired James Comey. He didn't fire the entire FBI. If there's something there, the FBI is going to continue to investigate it.
The disclosure that President Donald Trump allegedly asked Jim Comey to drop an FBI investigation has raised the question of whether this may constitute obstruction of justice. There's plenty of disagreement.
The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI's investigation, so there's anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. We've published about 33,000 of Clinton's emails when she was Secretary of State.
We haven't seen a situation where you have the FBI director talk about an investigation side by side with the attorney general who confirms, yes, I accept the recommendation of the FBI director.
I did work well with Hillary Clinton when she was my colleague in the Senate, and I certainly don't bear her any ill will. But when I listened carefully to her commencement speech, what I heard was a laundry list of very expensive new programs that our country simply cannot afford, and that would add to our already overwhelming $17 trillion debt. I'm also disturbed by the mismatch in her answers to the questions about her e-mail server and what the FBI Director Comey says that the FBI's investigation found.
President Trump has criticized the Mueller investigation, fired Jim Comey, savagely attacked the FBI, and repeatedly suggested the Russia campaign influence in 2016 was a hoax. In the wake of all of this, the American people need to be assured that Mueller can carry out his investigation without interference.
The Clinton investigation was a completed investigation that the FBI had been deeply involved in, so I had an opportunity to understand all the facts and apply those facts against the law as I understood them. This investigation was under way - still going when I was fired. So it's nowhere near in the same place.
And, you know, in my opinion, when the FBI uses these sources, there are a lot of internal guidelines on how they can be used and particularly if they touch in any way on First Amendment activity. So you know, journalists, political activity, clergy people - all of those get extra special protection when it comes to FBI investigation.
It's been clear for some time that FBI Director Comey has lost the confidence of Republicans, Democrats, and broader institutions, and his removal as FBI Director was probably overdue.
Will Hillary [Clinton] survive or will the villains...? [James] Comey and the FBI and the Republicans, will they succeed? There isn't any coverage of whether or not Hillary actually broke the law. The media's not interested in whether or not she actually trafficked in classified data.
Comey worried that the pressure from Trump to end the Flynn investigation or remove the 'cloud' of the larger investigation would 'infect' the investigation if he let others working on the case know about it. You don't need to believe the particulars of each exchange to see that this mode of management was not productive to a larger purpose.
That we have had to sue in federal court to discover the truth speaks volumes. The FBI has built a protective stonewall around Comey by refusing to release the Comey memos and refusing to disclose records of communications between the FBI and Comey prior to and regarding Comey's testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
I was going to say we saw Secretary [Hillary] Clinton reported that she believes that she would've won the election but for the interference of the FBI director James Comey.
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