It is one of the most enduring and consequential mysteries of the Trump-Russia investigation: Why did former FBI Director James Comey refuse to say publicly what he was telling President Trump in private -- that Trump was not the target of an ongoing probe?
That refusal ignited a chain of events that has consumed Washington for more than two years – including Comey’s firing by Trump, the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and ongoing claims that Trump obstructed justice.
Now an answer is emerging. Sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon file a report with evidence indicating that Comey was misleading the president. Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent.
Two U.S. officials briefed on the inspector general’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the president, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration. They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during that January 2017 meeting in New York.
In addition to adding notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter.
Although Comey took many actions on his own, he was not working in isolation. One focus of Horowitz’s inquiry is the private Jan. 6, 2017, briefing Comey gave the president-elect in New York about material in the Democratic-commissioned dossier compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Reports of that meeting were used days later by BuzzFeed, CNN and other outlets as a news hook for reporting on the dossier’s lascivious and unsubstantiated claims.
Comey’s meeting with Trump took place one day after the FBI director met in the Oval Office with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to discuss how to brief Trump — a meeting attended by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who would soon go to work for CNN. //
Though Comey claims in his book he was “protecting" the president-elect from “any kind of coercion” or blackmail by Moscow, several former and current federal law enforcement officials said he was really testing his reaction to see if he showed signs of guilt or revealed information that could be used against him in the conspiracy case the FBI had already been building against no fewer than four of his advisers — Flynn, Page, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort. In fact, it was Comey who just a couple of weeks later would dispatch two agents to the White House to grill Flynn about his post-election conversations with Russian diplomats. (Flynn’s lawyers argue the FBI set a “perjury trap” for the retired general.)
“We are not investigating you, sir,” Comey told Trump, an assurance that “seemed to quiet him,” the former director remarked in his book.
That statement seems undercut by the fact that Comey typed up his notes on his laptop in his government vehicle less than five minutes after he walked out of Trump Tower, according to a heavily redacted Jan. 7, 2017, email to his top aides. Comey self-classified the notes at the “SECRET” level.
“I executed the session exactly as planned,” Comey reported back to his “sensitive matter team.”
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/07/22/comey_under_scrutiny_for_own_inquiry_and_misleading_trump_119584.html
That's not a mocking emoji, either. That last post is not going into any HoF, that's for sure. 
take care GB. 
