‘The Comey Rule’

“The Comey Rule” was recommended to me by a friend in the days leading up to the election, and I’m very glad I took his recommendation seriously.

It’s a two part series that lays out the timeline of events that dragged the FBI into the political muck during the 2016 presidential campaign, including the scandal surrounding Hillary’s email servers, as well as the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. It’s rather dense and you need to pay attention to the details, but I found the first half in particular to be absolutely gripping. It’s laid out so that part one covers the events leading up to the election, and part two covers the events after the election.

Though many of the characters make their political beliefs clear, I found it to have been produced in rather apolitical fashion. The show makers clearly wanted to lay out the documentable facts for the audience and help people understand what happened, and teasing out which “bombshell” headlines from that campaign season were actually of seismic importance, and which were just filler. It really impresses upon you the importance of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies remaining independent of the politics that consume the most of the federal government, and it demonstrates how our institutions can be fundamentally damaged when they kowtow to political pressure.

You can watch “The Comey Rule” on Showtime, but if you don’t have showtime, you can purchase it for seven bucks on iTunes or Amazon Prime.