Wall Street Journal Raises Troubling Concerns About Obama's Choice To Head The FBI

President Barack Obama has nominated James Comey, a former Assistant Attorney General in the George W. Bush administration, to succeed Robert Mueller as FBI Director. Leftist blogger Sheila Kennedy, who claims to be a civil rights advocate--at least when it's a Republican president infringing on our rights instead of a Democrat like Barack Obama, describes Comey as "a highly regarded" choice to serve a 10-year term running the country's top law enforcement agency. The Wall Street Journal editors point to Comey's "troubling record of prosecutorial excess and bad judgment," which seemed to have been missed by the former executive director of the ACLU of Indiana. Here's a sampling of Comey's record:

• Comey is the guy at the Justice Department who kept vouching for the FBI's pathetic attempt to frame virologist Stephen Hatfill as the person responsible for the 2001 Anthrax mail attacks in the weeks following 9/11. After the FBI eventually had to concede they had the wrong guy, Hatfill sued and won a $5.8 million judgment from the Justice Department.
• Comey tried to prosecute banker Frank Quattrone on the strength of one e-mail for supposedly engaging in obstruction of justice and witness tampering after he couldn't find any banking-related charges to bring against him. The first trial ended in a hung jury. He won a single conviction on retrial, only to have it overturned by the Court of Appeals in 2006.
• Comey led a dubious espionage case against two lobbyists for AIPAC based on bogus secret information. The Justice Department dropped the case in 2009 after it fell apart in court but not before destroying the careers of the two lobbyists. 
• Comey engineered the appointment of his buddy Patrick Fitzgerald (who swept tons of evidence of Obama's criminal wrongdoing in Chicago under the rug) to investigate whether any crime was committed in outing the identity of a non-covered CIA employee, Valerie Plame. He then supported a widening of Fitzgerald's investigation despite the fact that he learned the identity of the actual leaker, the State Department's Richard Armitage, only months into his investigation. That fact was kept secret and not revealed until long after the Justice Department pressed its case against Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice after its case against him for leaking Plame's identity fell apart before the case got off the ground. The actual leaker was never charged with a crime. President Bush later pardoned Libby on the grounds that his unrelated conviction was the product of prosecutorial abuse.
• Comey also stood behind Fitzgerald's decision to send New York Times reporter Judith Miller to jail for 85 days for refusing to reveal her sources during an investigation that turned out to be a total waste of taxpayer dollars.

The only redeeming act Comey's supporters tout from his role in the Bush administration was his rushing to the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was seriously ill at the time, to prevent White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez and Chief of Staff Andrew Card from getting his signature on a 75-day reauthorization of a "top secret" warrantless wiretap program that President Bush had authorized shortly after 9/11. Comey threatened to resign and make the program public if Ashcroft signed the reauthorization, which makes him a hero according to the mainstream media meme while lowly NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden is a traitor who must be charged to the fullest extent of the law.

Before you think too highly of Comey's actions concerning the warrantless wiretap program, you should consider the fact that he became general counsel to defense contractor Lockheed Martin after leaving the Justice Department. "Such was the 'price' for defying the Bush White House," the Wall Street Journal deadpans. Gee, I wonder how Comey will come down on the never-ending, manufactured war on terror? Now ask Sheila Kennedy why she finds Comey "a highly regarded" choice to run the FBI.