All during the Bush administration, including his mid-term election, the press and the left, to the extent they are not the same thing, extolled the virtues of people who leaked confidential and, in some cases, highly classified information to undermine the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We even saw one US congressman, Jack Murtha, pushing a strategy deliberately designed to increase US casualties in Iraq so those casualties could be used as a club to force Bush to withdraw. Over and over, from the Dixie Chicks to Cindy Sheehan we were told that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

Now we see what the left truly means is that dissent is patriotic so long as it hurts a Republican. If it hurts a Democrat, well, then it is damned near treasonous.

Only a week ago, FBI Director James Comey notified Congress that he was re-opening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails based upon the FBI discovering 650,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s tenure at State on the personal and very unsecure devices of Huma Abedin and her soon-to-be-convicted-sex-offender-ex-husband the aptly named Anthony Weiner. Overnight, Comey went from bold, principled hero to cretinous tool of the VRWC. Via Ben Domenech in The Transom:

The headlines and editorials in the aftermath of James Comey’s decision to not recommend a continued case against Hillary Clinton regarding her email server were full of praise for the director and defended him against Republican attacks. The Washington Post profiled “The plain-speaking FBI director: James Comey delivers ‘hard truths’” – “It was, say those who know him, classic Jim Comey: stern, unflinching and standing on principle — politics and position be damned.” http://vlt.tc/2m7i  The New York Times praised his “candor and transparency”. http://vlt.tc/2m7h  At The Huffington Post, they wrote “Comey, a 6-foot-8 Irish-American with impeccable bipartisan (but mostly Republican) credentials, has effectively avoided turning the nightmarish circus of the 2016 campaign into a full-blown apocalypse.”  http://vlt.tc/2m7j  And Dana Milbank, always subdued, wrote that “Republican attacks on Comey undermine the rule of law.” http://vlt.tc/2m7g

Well, apparently attacks on Comey no longer undermine the rule of law, because now he’s being targeted in an official complaint alleging he has, by notifying Congress of significant new evidence discovered in the case, violated the Hatch Act. http://vlt.tc/2m7k  What a difference a letter makes. Oh – and he was right, they’re new. http://vlt.tc/2m7l  “The FBI has found emails related to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state on the laptop belonging to the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner, according to a U.S. official. These emails, CBS News’ Andres Triay reports, are not duplicates of emails found on Secretary Clinton’s private server.” So much for that talking point.

As it turns out, we now know that a low level war broke out with the FBI over Comey’s handling of the investigation and between the FBI and Justice over Justice’s insistence that Hillary Clinton was bulletproof. Comey, it seems, sent the letter to Congress about the investigation because he knew his people were going to leak the story and make him and the FBI look like they were running interference for Hillary.

And he might have been correct:

Host Brian Kilmeade asked Giuliani about comments he made on Fox & Friends on October 25 — three days before FBI Director James Comey wrote a letter to congressional Republicans informing them the Bureau was taking a look at newly discovered emails. That morning, Giuliani said, “I think he’s [Donald Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”

One of them was apparently the Comey letter about the renewed investigation into Clinton, which created a political firestorm and a fresh line of attack for Trump during the campaign’s closing days.

On Friday morning, Kilmeade asked Giuliani, “A couple days before [the Comey letter] broke, you’re on with Martha McCallum, and you looked at Martha and go, ‘Well look out, something’s coming down,’ and it certainly did. What did you know?”

Giuliani — a former Associate Attorney General and U.S. Attorney in the Reagan administration — replied that while he’s “not a part of it at all,” he heard “former FBI agents telling me that there’s a revolution going on inside the FBI and it’s now at a boiling point.”

Later, Giuliani added, “I did nothing to get it out, I had no role in it. Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it, and I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents.”

All that you can say here is that some of Giuliani’s FBI cronies told him of the food fight going on over the Clinton investigations (yes, plural, there are at least five FBI investigations involving either Clinton or her inner circle). He hinted that something, he didn’t say what, was going to happen. And it did.

Compared to what the CIA pulled in 2004, leaking highly classified assessments of Iraq and clearing a senior CIA official, Michael Scheuer, to write a very anti-Bush book, this doesn’t rise to the level of an nothingburger. What is more important is that all of this could have been avoided if the FBI leadership had shown a modicum of personal integrity during the first Clinton investigation.