James Comey has been abusing his power for years

As Glenn Greenwald explained at the time of Comey’s confirmation in 2013, this story is incredibly misleading. Yes, Comey did curtail a small part of the NSA’s sprawling surveillance program in 2004, however, that occurred before the public ever knew of the existence of any NSA domestic program. The version of illegal warrantless wiretapping that the New York Times revealed in 2005, which sparked a firestorm of liberal criticism and widespread accusations of illegal conduct, was the program that Comey was totally fine with and signed off on.

Why he is celebrated as anything close to the hero is baffling. During the Bush administration, Comey also aggressively defended the arrest and due process-free imprisonment of a US citizen, Jose Padilla, on US soil. He was held as an “enemy combatant”, tortured, and refused a lawyer for three and half years – to this day, one of the most egregious violations of the constitution by the Bush administration. In addition, Comey also gave his legal sign-off on torture techniques during the Bush administration, despite harboring personal doubts.

Since taking over at the FBI, speaking up without all – or any – of the facts has become a Comey specialty. He has led a high-profile two-year fight to essentially outlaw end-to-end encryption, a vital tool that protects citizens’ privacy and security. He has done so freely admitting he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, while his demands fly in the face of the opinions of many prominent computer scientists, who have argued mandating backdoors in encryption is impossible to do safely and a recipe for disaster.