Is This the Best the Administration's Surrogates Can Do?

[maddezmom]

Is This the Best the Administration's Surrogates Can Do?


Marty Lederman


Doug Kmiec, head of OLC at the tail-end of the Reagan Administration, has a profoundly misguided Op-Ed in tomorrow's Washington Post in which he tries to minimize the import of James Comey's testimony -- and even goes so far as to insinuate that Comey, Ashcroft and Goldsmith are the ones who acted in an ethically dubious manner!

Where to begin?

How about at the beginning. Kmiec kicks off his Op-Ed by calling Comey's testimony "staggeringly histrionic." Which is, uh, "staggeringly" wrong. Comey is hardly an eager or self-aggrandizing witness. He is about as credible as any witness you'll ever see, supremely cautious in what he says -- he even repeatedly declines to take the bait when some Senators try to elicit testimony that he knows will appear as sound bites damaging to the President and Attorney General -- and nothing about his presentation was the least bit histrionic. Indeed, it's about as far from histrionic as one can imagine. But don't take my word for it. Just watch the video.

Kmiec then attacks Senator Specter for suggesting that the hospital incident has an air of the Saturday Night Massacre about it -- "the comparison to Watergate is wholly inapt," writes Kmiec, because "Watergate involved a real crime."

more:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/05/is-this-best-administrations-surrogates.html

[sam sarrha]

1. move along folks... no crime here, non-story, move along