Why Robert Hur’s report should force Dems to 'think back to the Comey years': political analyst

11 February 2024

In a Sunday, February 11 op-ed for MSNBC, Vanity Fair correspondent Molly Jong-Fast emphasizes, "If Democrats truly want to prevail" in November, then the party must "think back to the Comey years and let them serve as a lesson, lest they become a curse."

The Fast politics with Molly Jong-Fast host reflects on October 28, 2016, the day former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey released his letter. The letter that many say likely won Donald Trump the election over Hillary Clinton. FiveThirtyEight notes, "The letter, which said the FBI had 'learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation' into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College."

Jong-Fast writes, "The Comey letter had created just enough muddiness to make it seem like both candidates were ethically challenged. It was the false equivalence that Trump was able to ride to the White House." She also emphasizes letter "led to almost nonstop speculation about what was in those emails," while "the mainstream media spent the following week and a half obsessing about the story when not freaking out about Clinton almost fainting and Clinton having pneumonia."

The MSNBC contributor points to special counsel Robert Hur's February 8 345-page report, essentially "exonerating" President Joe Biden of any charges over his handling of classified documents.

She writes:

But Hur, who used to work for the Trump administration, couldn’t let Biden off the hook entirely, especially 269 days before an election. Hur, a member of a Republican Party that now largely works as a campaign arm for the former president, delivered the goods for his party. Sure, he found no legal basis to charge Biden, but but but… Hur proceeded to editorialize ad nauseam about Biden’s mental acuity, delivering right-wing talking points up on a platter. He wrote, '[At] trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.'

Jong-Fast encourages Democrats, despite their collective "outrage" over the report, "to exercise some self-reflection here. [Attorney General Merrick] Garland didn’t need to appoint a Republican special counsel. Garland didn’t need to let Hur release this report filled with talking points for the right-wing media echo chamber. Hur may be a partisan, but Garland let this happen."

She emphasizes while the GOP continues to weaponize the federal government, and just attempted "to impeach a Cabinet secretary for not doing enough for the border while refusing to even vote on a border security bill," Democratic lawmakers "are living in 2012, trying to pretend that we don’t live in a world of hyperpartisanship."

Jong-Fast's full op-ed is here.

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