Communicating

I have been meaning to write about James Comey for some time now.

It wasn't a big thing, so it wasn't high priority. There are always a lot of other things to write. Now he is more pertinent, but it is kind of different and kind of the same.

Months ago when Comey recommended that there should be no criminal charges filed regarding Hillary Clinton's e-mail and spoke to Congress about it, I know that many people praised him for making a reasonable decision, and some were mad due to their certainty of criminal charges always being appropriate if your last name is Clinton.

I remember noticing that the way he gave the news was kind of nasty. He had no cause for indictment, but he didn't want to exonerate her either which seemed very personal. The way he phrased it was reluctant and with a lot of insinuation. I felt like that came back to bite him when he was being questioned by pro-indictment members of Congress, and he got a little testy with them. What did you expect to happen?

I thought that there might be a future post about how what we say is important, and speaking truthfully may not only mean not actively lying, but also the clarity of expression. I didn't think it would go beyond that.

It seems clear now that Comey has let his personal preference affect his judgment. Even if federal charges don't happen, and even if he keeps his job, he has lost moral authority and the respect of colleagues, which will make leadership very difficult.

In that light, it goes beyond how we communicate to the bigger choices we make, and whom we are. What do you value most? If it comes down to your political preferences versus your integrity, which wins? And yet, it kind of is the same point, because who we are inevitably informs what we say. We can try and hide what we think and know, and keep information back, but often we don't even know what we are revealing. I don't think Comey meant to show himself as petty and irritable then, but he did.

The thing is, we could be having better discussions about the e-mail. For example, when I first looked it up, I was explaining it to my sister and the minute I said "Blackberry" she said "Oh!", and she got it completely. She was a part of that time when everyone had a Blackberry (and called it a "crackberry") and when you had to jump through various hoops to use it with your private e-mail -- a process which many chose to avoid.

I thought it was interesting because that was happening at a very technology-forward company, and yet they were not keeping up with the technology in a very real way. I thought about how you would make those decisions, to get the right balance of taking advantage of the newest technology and also being secure. (I don't know the answers for that, but I know whom I would ask if I wanted to get into it.)

That we don't generally talk about prosecuting Colin Powell for also using a private server, or how we know the State Department server was hacked while Clinton was Secretary of State but that there is no evidence that her private server was hacked, or about the Bush White House losing 22 million e-mails while we focus on Clinton's thirty thousand e-mails tells me a lot about the hypocrisy involved. So does comparing the amount of news coverage that focuses on Clinton's e-mail versus coverage of Trump's cheating people, rape charges, charity abuse, race-baiting, and destroying e-mail evidence in lawsuits. That is a problem against which I feel impotent with rage.

So here is just something else that I found interesting. It appears that a lot of the messages in question for Clinton related to planning Chelsea's wedding. People were skeptical that they could all be that, but I have seen others confirm that for a wedding like that, forty thousand e-mails would not be at all unusual. And that was just such a horrifying thought, that so much e-mail could be necessary. I can see how it would happen, but even more I see why you might elope.