The Comey Rule Recap: Lose-Lose

The Comey Rule

Night One

Season 1

Episode 1

Editor’s Rating

3 stars

***

Photo: Ben Designate Holzberg/CBS Tv

It begins, as these items continuously enact, with a late-night screech-new monologue. Jay Leno did them so continuously that there’s a two-minute supercut of characters searching at him focus on what’s going down in the movie. Right here it’s Stephen Colbert in a 2017 monologue, likening James Comey, the inclined FBI director, to the Harry Potter persona Severus Snape. “First, he looks love a true guy. Then, he looks love a depraved guy. Then it looks love he sacrificed himself to set other of us.” He provides, “Are we going to derive out he loved us all alongside?”

Right here’s how contemporary political docudramas tend to work, and it’s a cause why many of them are so shocking. You see the the same formula at work in theatrical motion pictures love The American President or W., or cable motion pictures love Reveal or Sport Swap, or in miniseries love the most modern Showtime seven-parter about Roger Ailes, The Loudest Affirm: Mammoth stars and recognizable persona actors lining as a lot as enact imitations of political actors, clips from late-night monologues or pundit-stocked cable programs to dump exposition or register archaic wisdom, and a general tick-tock of events which might per chance per chance be wholly familiar to the cognoscenti and principally familiar to all people else.

In its worst moments, The Comey Rule does minute to give a proof for apart itself from the dreary slush pile of other docudramas basically based fully fully on factual events or books — in this case, Comey’s 2018 memoir A Increased Loyalty. And but the series’s seasoned author-director, Billy Ray, has a journalistic style that provides extra shading to real-life characters than anticipated. Ray’s directorial debut, 2003’s Shattered Glass, drew out of the ordinary tension and suspense from the connection between the disgraced Fresh Republic fabulist Stephen Glass and his editor, Charles Lane, and his most modern script for Richard Jewell framed the downfall of the wrongly accused 1996 Olympic bomber as a checklist of crushing disillusionment. It’s now not sufficient merely to dramatize the data love a Saturday Night Live sketch with out jokes, but to possess some roughly opt on it.

In that, The Comey Rule is intermittently a hit. There’s an thought in journalism circles that when each and every aspect are offended a pair of fragment, the reporter ought to be doing something correct. That form of bothsides-ism is principally nonsense — telling the fact is extra well-known than political triangulation — but Ray is determined to string the needle on Comey, a one that came to be hated by Democrats and Republicans alike. With out minimizing the narcissism that underscores Comey’s above-it-all righteousness, Ray makes the evident but well-known level that the inclined FBI director’s involvement in the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia investigation was a lose-lose scenario. He was at all times going to splash gasoline on those fires; it was true a matter of how powerful.

The first half of of The Comey Rule covers the duration leading as a lot as Donald Trump getting elected president in 2016. (Truly, Brendan Gleeson’s Trump, who will figure prominently on the next day night’s conclusion, doesn’t jabber a notice right here.) In an ingenious framing tool, the checklist is informed by the jaundiced level of view of Rod Rosenstein, the inclined U.S. Deputy Attorney Overall, performed right here by the at all times-very neutral correct Stride McNairy. This Rosenstein is solid as a savvy political operator, a occupation public servant who’s true at maintaining his head down and warding off partisan ire. Comey was the tsunami that at closing swept him out to sea, and there was nothing he might per chance per chance furthermore enact about it.

However, there’s now not powerful Comey might per chance per chance furthermore possess accomplished to alter his destiny, both. After accepting the assign of abode to be triumphant Robert Mueller as FBI director — from Kingsley Ben-Adir’s conspicuously young Barack Obama — Comey settles into the job as a cornpone idealist, believing the FBI to be an unsullied institution for justice. Sooner than giving him the job, Obama asks if he’s the form of guy who wants a amount of attention. “It’s now not a huge driver for me,” he lies. Consideration is something he craves from Day One, with his ostentatious appeals to the sinful-and-file, even though The Comey Rule argues that he was going to receive attention whether or now not he wanted it or now not. The quiz is whether or now not or now not placing himself out entrance was an act of self-sacrifice and inner most accountability or merely egotism.

The lengthy fuse on Comey’s tenure on the FBI is lit on June 10, 2015, when Andrew McCabe (Michael Kelly) stops by his assign of abode of job with an Inspector Overall referral on Hillary Clinton’s emails. The quiz for the FBI is whether or now not or now not Clinton’s shriek of a non-public email server for legit industrial as secretary of Converse violated federal rules. “You know you’re screwed, correct?” Comey is warned. “I don’t see a determined final consequence right here no matter what we derive.” Comey doesn’t appear to settle for that inevitability, but he does feel love “Operation Midyear Exam,” as the investigation is dubbed, ought to be “letter-ultimate” in figuring out whether or now not Clinton knowingly broke the rules in mishandling classified data or deleting emails linked to the Condominium inquiry into Benghazi.

The FBI’s resolution is that she was guilty of downhearted judgment, but now not of corruption. And it needed to derive that resolution twice: As soon as when Midyear Exam was accomplished poring by her many units and again, quickly earlier than the election, when Anthony Weiner’s pc pc, seized after he was nabbed allegedly sending sexually protest texts to a 15-year-former girl, was found to grasp emails from Weiner’s partner Huma Abedin, who was serving as vice chair of Clinton’s campaign. In each and every instances, Comey assign himself entrance and center, and in each and every instances, he was closely criticized by Democrats for harming Clinton on the polls. It shouldn’t possess been difficult for Clinton to argue that she was extra faithful than a candidate with a history of shady monetary dealings and sexual assault, but Comey’s actions helped form a flawed equivalency on the jabber of corruption. In the aftermath of the election, the Clinton campaign blamed its swish loss as we screech on Comey’s reopening of the electronic mail investigation.

The Comey Rule credibly represents Comey’s decision-making process, even while suggesting that he persistently chose the awful course. (In contrivance conferences, the FBI attorneys performed by Amy Seimetz and Steve Zissis offer the easiest counsel — and are respectfully overruled.) The nasty tarmac meeting between Obama’s legal legitimate general Loretta Lynch (Michael Hyatt) and Invoice Clinton convinces him now to now not appear alongside her or Sally Yates (Holly Hunter), for trouble of their connection to the Clintons. So the most well-known ending of Midyear Exam becomes a minor fiasco, with Comey making an are attempting to sound aesthetic and balanced by chiding Hillary Clinton love a schoolmarm earlier than exonerating her. Worse soundless is his nasty letter reopening the case after Weiner’s arrest, which violates the agency’s guidance about taking stream end to an election.

Casting Jeff Daniels as Comey is a miniature masterstroke, because Comey is love a extra depraved version of the crusading anchor Daniels performed in The Newsroom, challenging by the the same neutral correct sure wager, but now not as clearly in the ultimate. What’s paramount to this Comey is that he be understood as a person of honor and integrity and that the FBI as an establishment receive pleasure from the the same recognition, which is now not the the same part as showing true judgment. It looks probably that somebody presiding over the Clinton emails and the Trump-Russia investigation might per chance per chance furthermore now not set the FBI from charges of partisanship. Even Bob Mueller, the very mannequin of the straight-shooter-revered-by-all-facets form, would now not emerge from this mess with that image intact.

“Night One” enables Comey’s partner Patrice (Jennifer Ehle) to channel nearly all of the disappointment in him. The Comeys each and every know the dangers of a Trump presidency, and the message it could maybe per chance per chance furthermore ship to their four daughters, but Patrice can’t screech him out of placing his thumb on the dimensions. Comey pays the value on the next day night’s episode, for sure, when the Russia investigation begins to consume up steam and Trump inevitably sours on him. The scenes linked to that aspect of Comey’s checklist are a pair of of the worst in this half of — e.g., a well-known meeting between Michael Flynn and Vladimir Putin that promises a gala hosted by satellite tv for pc by Julian Assange, with Jill Stein at his table — but Ray’s opt on the electronic mail investigation is principally sound, even though the dialogue is simply too weighted down with exposition and pundit-communicate.

James Comey came out of this mess cleanly. That left his colleagues — and the country — maintaining the mop.

• The scenes fascinating “lovers” Peter Strzok (Steven Pasquale) and Lisa Page (Oona Chaplin) are so ludicrous they seem adapted from Trump’s Twitter feed. The combination of political conspiracy and pillow screech is comically on-the-nostril and particularly merciless to Page, who’s viewed as a woman who’s brazen in her opinions and her sexuality. That happens to be the the same scenario that plagued Ray’s screenplay for Richard Jewell, which was rightly criticized for tarring Kathy Scruggs, a now-deceased journalist, as a runaway sexpot who slept with sources to receive data.

• McCabe furthermore will get a Trump-Twitter-feed-stage overview, courtesy of inclined FBI deputy director Designate Giuliano on his technique out the door. “Right here’s a lunchpail custom,” he tells McCabe. “Utilizing a blue Porsche carrying matching blue cufflinks might per chance per chance furthermore neutral now not be the easiest message so that you can ship.”

• Including a scene in the aftermath of the Pulse Nightclub taking pictures is a technique to stress that Comey had other matters to tend to as director, but it’s now not value witnessing the carnage for that level.

• “If he’d true been a minute bit humbler, a minute bit less determined that his morality is all that mattered, the enviornment wouldn’t know my title on the present time.” Whereas you happen to’re purchasing for a thesis, Rosenstein provides one right here.