There was an awful lot of smock swirling around last Friday (And where there's smock, there's liar. I know where the door is, thanks.), so partly obscured in it was James Comey's appearance before a closed-door session of the House Intelligence Committee. In it, Comey, probably secure in the knowledge that his fingerprints on this presidency* are now thoroughly obscured by those of various bagmen and those of bad actors from many lands, finally admitted clearly that his inexcusable meddling in the campaign was prompted by an insubordinate New York field office that was leaking like a rotten bucket to the likes of Rudy Giuliani, a fairly rotten old bucket himself.

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In the transcript released by the committee, Comey is as explicit as he's ever been about his inability to discipline the FBI's New York office, which had an obsession with the Clintons bigger than the one Maureen Dowd has been toting around since 1991.

I was concerned that there appeared to be in the media a number of stories that might have been based on communications reporters or nonreporters like Rudy Giuliani were having with people in the New York field office. In particular, in I want to say mid October, maybe a little bit later, Mr. Giuliani was making statements that appeared to be based on his knowledge of workings inside the FBI New York. And then my recollection is there were other stories that were in the same ballpark that gave me a general concern that we may have a leak problem -- unauthorized disclosure problem out of New York, and so I asked that it be investigated.

The rest of the transcript is nothing we haven't heard before. It largely is Trey Gowdy's Last Ride across the plains of fantasy, with the lopheaded Javert from South Carolina summoning all the conjuring words—Fusion GPS! Strzok! Dossier!—like an aging band playing the summer shed tour, and it's also a chance for Comey burnish his dented reputation one more time.

But it is good to have clearly on the record the fact the former director of the FBI believes that it wasn't just the Russians who were trying to monkeywrench the Democratic candidate for president, and that the former director of the FBI was so incapable of managing his subordinates that he let it happen. Historians of the future are going to be amazed, and then they are like to drink very heavily.

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Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.