Rhetorical questions: What moves James Comey? What makes him tick?

Why did he emerge from the mists of mystery which rightly enfold the FBI, to make statements about Hillary Clinton’s unlikely innocence and then again her likely guilt? Was doing that part of his job description? Seems improbable.

He is such a tall man that when he stands among other people, he has no choice but to look down on most of them. He is surrounded by the tops of people’s heads. So prominent in bodily presence is he, and yet, until the last couple of years, unnoticed. Did he crave more attention? Then why did he (as he says he did) hide among the White House curtains in the hope (disappointed) of escaping the attention of President Trump?

An enigma.

Did he crave fame? He has attained notoriety at least, which may in time be infamy, if it is not forgotten.

He pinched the title of his apologia, A Higher Loyalty, from one of our posts about him: The higher loyalty of James Comey, September 11, 2016. (So we will maintain in the teeth of all doubt and derision). Of course we meant it ironically, since in our account his “higher loyalty” was given to Hillary Clinton, to whose level even a midget would need to stoop. But we don’t grudge it. It’s probably the best-worded phrase printed anywhere in or on his book. (Which we have not read and have no intention of reading. We go by what is said about it, and by the banality of what we’ve heard him say on TV. And we freely confess to our unshakable prejudice against him.)

To what “higher loyalty” does he himself lay claim? Any hint in his subtitle, “Truth, Lies, and Leadership”? What “truth”? Whose “leadership”? His own? If not, the answers to those questions will remain forever in the vast hot-air Closet of Incoherent Explanations to which politicians’ and bureaucrats’ memoirs and apologias are consigned by the laws of nature.

As to “lies” – is he loyal to some or any of them? Not to all, anyway. His self-contradictions are common knowledge.

What we hear and read about him is that, in addition to lying, he revealed some parts of what he knew – directly to the president-elect, deviously to the press through a friend – while concealing other parts, highly significant facts, among the curtains of his mind. (Along such lines as: “We have a dossier about you Mr. Trump, in which it is alleged that you colluded with a p(r)osse of Russian whores to let you watch them micturate on a hotel bed in Moscow. We also know who paid to have the dossier compiled, but we won’t tell you who it was.” And not a hint did he drop. Even though she who paid for the scurrilous lies was his recently defeated rival for the presidency.)

Many Democrats – whose side he seems, at least intermittently, to favor – want his guts for garters. They, including Hillary Clinton herself, blame him for her loss and Donald Trump’s triumphant gain of the presidency in 2016. She blames lots of people. How much blame – or from our point of view credit – for her loss and his victory belongs to James Comey, who can say?

Millions of Republicans and conservatives long for his utter undoing: indictment, trial, imprisonment, humiliation. Why? That is a question we can answer. There may be many reasons, but we reckon that the big one, the one that towers above all others, is that he could have brought crooked Hillary Clinton to indictment, trial, imprisonment and humiliation – and didn’t do it.