Is it really so hard to just follow the rules? According to DOJ policy, private emails should not be used for official business – any official business, not just classified materials. One would assume that the nation’s top law dog would know and have a healthy appreciation for following the rules. One would be wrong. In the IG report released yesterday afternoon, there are many curious facts that support the idea that former FBI Director James Comey was a poor leader, with poor judgment, and fully deserved to be fired for doing a terrible job.

The inspector general’s report noted that in October 2016, Comey spoke at the FBI’s annual SAC Conference in San Diego, and noted that his investigators’ view was “there really isn’t anything here that anybody would prosecute” about Clinton’s server.

But Comey added, “I have gotten emails from some employees about this, who said, ‘If I did what Hillary Clinton did I’d be in huge trouble.'”

“My response is you bet your ass you’d be in huge trouble,” Comey said in that speech.

“If you used a personal email, Gmail or if you [had] the capabilities to set up your own email domain, if you used an unclassified personal email system to do our business in the course of doing our business even though you were communicating with people with clearances and doing work you discussed classified matters in that, in those communications, TS/SCI, special access programs, you would be in huge trouble in the FBI,” Comey said.

But one truly ironic fact is that at the same time he was investigating Hillary Clinton for improper use of a private email system, he himself was using his own Google email address to conduct official business. Of course, he must have thought, since he wasn’t sending anything classified, bending the rules bit didn’t matter, it’s for convenience sake.

Asked by IG investigators if he had any concerns about conducting bureau business on his personal device and account, “Comey stated that he did not,” the report says.

He also said he was certain his work would be captured by FBI email servers for record-keeping purposes.

“Because it was incidental and I was always making sure that the work got forwarded to the government account to either my own account or [FBI chief of staff James Rybicki], so I wasn’t worried from a record-keeping perspective and it was, because there will always be a copy of it in the FBI system and I wasn’t doing classified work there, so I wasn’t concerned about that,” Comey told investigators, according to the report.

Comey added that he did not use his personal email or laptop for classified or sensitive information, and only did use his personal email “when I needed to word process an unclassified (document) that was going to be disseminated broadly, (such as a) public speech or public email to the whole organization,” the report says.

Clinton has also said she did not use personal emails for classified purposes and stressed that her messages were captured by State Department servers at some point.

In the report, it was revealed that Comey would copy himself or forward emails to himself all on his Gmail. The issue was he didn’t have a secure connection at home, and of course he might have to do work at home from time to time, except that exact scenario is against DOJ policy. Do not conduct official business on a private system. Why is that so hard?

Even Hillary is puzzled.

But my emails. https://t.co/G7TIWDEG0p

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 14, 2018

A fish rots from the head down. If the head of the organization is going to skirt the rules, he has no authority in which to demand others to follow them either. Sending a few emails to his private email may seem like a small offense in the big scheme of things, but really it is indicative of the kind of operation he ran, and it is no surprise at all that so many FBI personnel were also bending a few rules here and there. The IG put out a gaming graphic of the numerous leaks coming out of the FBI. It’s like one of those criminal wire graphs you see in heist movies!

Page 458 of the new Inspector General Report on the FBI’s 2015-2016 investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. It says: “We have profound concerns about the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered during our review.”

It goes on to say that FBI agents were enticed to spill the goods from reporters who plied them with meals, invitations to parties, tickets to sporting events and golf outings.

….

“We do not believe the problem is with the FBI’s policy, which we found to be clear and unambiguous,” the report says. “Rather, we concluded that these leaks highlight the need to change what appears to be a cultural attitude.”

The connections between agents and journalists who were giving away all kinds of favors to the agents in exchange for information is massive. The FBI had a policy against leaking too, but following their boss’s lead of ignoring the rules, just a little bit here and there, lead to systematic disregard for the rules.

And that’s how we get to the stenchof the entire investigation. The whole thing stinks, from top to bottom!

So where is Christopher Wray in all of this? He says people just don’t know the rules. They just made some mistakes.

In contrast to Comey, he seems mute! At this time, it would seem appropriate to project a bit more strength in leadership at the FBI. What exactly is he doing to clean up this mess and ensure that people are simply following the rules? More training? Pathetic.