^ trump's whole "i won't stop comey from testifying" is such utter bullshit.
alasdair
alasdair
2017 Trump Presidency Thread
- Thread starter Escher's Waterfall
- Start date
- Status
Escher's Waterfall
Bluelight Crew
Can you imagine being on Trump's legal team?
I wonder if they twitch every time they hear "Twitter".
I wonder if they twitch every time they hear "Twitter".
LucidSDreamr
Bluelighter
body slamming citizens for asking a question, sexual harrasment of women, obstruction of justing, blackmailing fBi directors.
any citizen or professional would get fire....politicians (only just the ppl in charge of shaping the country)....no consequence for crime and still get elected. something is very very wrong
politicans should be the smartest altrustic peolpe....not the scum of society
any citizen or professional would get fire....politicians (only just the ppl in charge of shaping the country)....no consequence for crime and still get elected. something is very very wrong
politicans should be the smartest altrustic peolpe....not the scum of society
Scrofula
Bluelight Crew
For a while I considered med school. But when my classes started to overlap with the "pre-meds" I gave it up forever. Med school admissions selects for the whiniest back-stabbing grade-grubbers out there, no curiosity, only status-seeking--like elections.
Erikmen
Bluelight Crew
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- May 3, 2014
- Messages
- 20,707
Gosh, it must be so tense. I wonder how low and heavy the working atmosphere must be.
I have to say, I was expecting a little more scandalous content than what I have read so far in Comey's testimony, but I am sure that there will be more to come. There seems to be quite a lot of sensationalism surrounding this story, so one really needs to objectify the critical content here.
Is anybody willing to state for me what they think the main points are in this senate hearing thus far, because I am having a little trouble getting to the nitty-gritty of it since I am a little tired today not from the US?
Is anybody willing to state for me what they think the main points are in this senate hearing thus far, because I am having a little trouble getting to the nitty-gritty of it since I am a little tired today not from the US?
Escher's Waterfall
Bluelight Crew
Comey's story never had a smoking gun.
Trump's conversation with Comey was something he should have never said, because it could be interpreted a certain way, but there's enough ambiguity that I think Trump will squeak through.
Trump's conversation with Comey was something he should have never said, because it could be interpreted a certain way, but there's enough ambiguity that I think Trump will squeak through.
Escher's Waterfall
Bluelight Crew
cduggles
Bluelight Crew
It's hard to say what is going to happen, because
a) a lot of investigation hasn't happened, partly because presidential transitions are always tumultuous and this one is particularly problematic, even in basic ways such as drastic understaffing of presidential appointees and major distractions created by Trump, and
b) a lot of the information about the Russia investigation isn't going to be discussed in public.
However, the appointment of an independent special prosecutor- particularly the former head of the FBI (talk about an ax to grind)- is going to mean a lot of fishing expeditions, likely including financial disclosures, by Donald Trump on down to Barron for reason X and then fact Y will be uncovered. Fact Y can be the basis for further investigation or impeachment.
Remember Bill Clinton was impeached because he lied under oath in a deposition about an extramarital affair, not for sexual impropriety.
Now imagine Trump trying to maintain his cool while being grilled for three different ongoing investigations (House, Senate, and the DOJ). Not happening.
I'm just hoping the investigation drags out long enough to keep the Republicans from doing anything legislatively, midterm elections pack more Democrats into Congress and then we elect a different President in 2020.
a) a lot of investigation hasn't happened, partly because presidential transitions are always tumultuous and this one is particularly problematic, even in basic ways such as drastic understaffing of presidential appointees and major distractions created by Trump, and
b) a lot of the information about the Russia investigation isn't going to be discussed in public.
However, the appointment of an independent special prosecutor- particularly the former head of the FBI (talk about an ax to grind)- is going to mean a lot of fishing expeditions, likely including financial disclosures, by Donald Trump on down to Barron for reason X and then fact Y will be uncovered. Fact Y can be the basis for further investigation or impeachment.
Remember Bill Clinton was impeached because he lied under oath in a deposition about an extramarital affair, not for sexual impropriety.
Now imagine Trump trying to maintain his cool while being grilled for three different ongoing investigations (House, Senate, and the DOJ). Not happening.
I'm just hoping the investigation drags out long enough to keep the Republicans from doing anything legislatively, midterm elections pack more Democrats into Congress and then we elect a different President in 2020.
Erikmen
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- May 3, 2014
- Messages
- 20,707
Me too!
Considering that due to the Tea Party issues, after Obama was elected, had an effect in the midterm elections by decreasing the number of Democrats in the Congress. One may presume that since a lot more has happened to Trump, it's fair to expect changes, if I understood it correctly. Idk.
Considering that due to the Tea Party issues, after Obama was elected, had an effect in the midterm elections by decreasing the number of Democrats in the Congress. One may presume that since a lot more has happened to Trump, it's fair to expect changes, if I understood it correctly. Idk.
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LucidSDreamr
Bluelighter
but that was motivated base on pure hate of blacks. while dissaproval of complete incompetence isn't as strong as a human emotion as ppl that where enraged a black person was president.
LucidSDreamr
Bluelighter
i don't think they see anything beyond hatred of mexicans and muslims. their own health and other issues don't matter one iota to them compared to their hate
trump won because of a lot of swing voters hating hillary and being fed up with washington....trumps base ....the 30% that still approve of him at this point ...
" he could stand in the middle of 5th avenue and shoot someone (hopefully a black person)...and they would still vote for him"
absolutely nothing whatsoever will stop them from supporting him short of him not persecuting minorities and appointing Nazi skinheads to his cabinet...as long as he does these things. nothing matters that trump does, and he knows that.
LucidSDreamr
Bluelighter
hey its not like he used a home email account for government business or anything. just committed felonies, lied, and fired a cop investigating a crime that would eventually lead to unearthing of trumps many felonies
Escher's Waterfall
Bluelight Crew
Wait until insurance costs spike if the GOP removes the ACA.
People do vote with their wallet.
cduggles
Bluelight Crew
^^Talk about a third rail!! I think it won't matter how many followers he has, this will mobilize a lot of people.
The Non-Americans Guide to James Comey's Testimony with Background and Salacious Details
ovidio Here are the Comey highlights, and I tried to add the interesting parts (Russian prostitutes, awkward moments, and dramatic accusations).
There is overlap because I took some things from multiple live bloggers and because multiple Senators questioned him, I grouped them together to make sense.
I only linked my major sources, so if you need one let me know.
YES IT'S LONG. I didn't use stims. :D
[The short version is that, according to Comey's testimony, Trump asked now-former FBI director James Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn (brief explanation below of who he is). Trump also asked him to pledge his loyalty to him and state publicly that he wasn't under investigation by the FBI, which he did privately. Comey didn't commit to either and was fired unceremoniously by Trump.]
--------
Background about Mike Flynn:
He is a former three-star general who retired in 2014 after being forced out as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Trump appointed him as his National Security Advisor. Trump fired Flynn after he ostensibly failed to reveal to vice president Mike Pence that he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia in a December phone call with Moscow’s ambassador to Washington.
President Obama directly warned Trump about Flynn. Now-fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism that she warned the White House counsel Don McGahn that Flynn was open to coercion by the Russians because he did not correctly relay what he discussed to Vice President Pence. During a second conversation, McGahn asks Yates, “Why does it matter to the Department of Justice if one White House official lies to another?” Yates explains that Flynn’s lies make him vulnerable to Russian blackmail because the Russians know that Flynn lied and could probably prove it, which was not desirable in a National Security Advisor. 8)
Flynn's problems are a lot more serious than discussing Russian sanctions and not admitting it.
One set of problems stems from Russia. In 2015, Russian-linked companies paid Mr. Flynn more than $65,000, including about $45,000 from the state-backed Russian television network RT for a December trip to Moscow, where he delivered a speech and sat next to President Vladimir V. Putin at a dinner. Last December, an American wiretap of the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak, intercepted conversations he had with Mr. Flynn discussing the Obama administration’s imposition of sanctions on Russia for meddling in the election.
The other set stems from Turkey. Last year, Mr. Flynn’s lobbying firm, Flynn Intel Group, was paid more than $500,000 by Inovo BV, a Dutch corporation. Inovo is owned by Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish-American businessman with ties to the administration of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. The work centered on research to discredit Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who lives in Pennsylvania, and whose extradition Mr. Erdogan has been seeking.
Possible charges:
•Making false statements knowingly and willfully to the government
•Taking foreign payments without permission
•Failure to register as a foreign agent
•Failure to comply with subpoenas
Flynn
Flynn 2
---------
Key Points:
Mr. Comey testified that President Trump and others in his administration had lied when they said agents had lost confidence in Mr. Comey.
"The administration chose to defame me and more importantly the F.B.I. by saying the organization was in disarray, that it was being poorly led, that the workforce had lost faith in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple.”
[Comey's firing was not handled well. Comey was in Los Angeles for an FBI field office inspection and recruitment event meant to improve diversity in the FBI. TV screens in background flashed news of firing. He thought it was a joke at first.]
Comey says he started documenting conversations with Trump from the start because “I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting.
After discussing his worry that Trump “might lie about the nature of our meeting,” Comey says he didn’t feel the need to contemporaneously document his private conversations with George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
"Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” Mr. Comey said, referring to Mr. Trump’s suggestion [by tweet] that he may have recorded their conversations.
In response to a question from Mr. Burr, Mr. Comey confirmed that Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, was facing a criminal investigation at the time he was fired. That means he was under criminal investigation while serving as the national security adviser, a job that gave him ready access to the president and almost all the secret intelligence possessed by the country’s spy agencies.
The Times reported last month that Mr. Flynn himself warned the Trump transition he was under investigation in early January, more than two weeks before the inauguration. Nonetheless, he was allowed to take up the national security post.![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
White House officials pushed back on The Times’s story, insisting that the Trump transition — and later, the White House — knew nothing of any criminal investigation, and questioning whether there was even an investigation into Mr. Flynn at the time.
Mr. Comey has now provided public confirmation that there was indeed an investigation underway while Mr. Flynn was serving at the White House.
Under questioning from Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, Comey clarifies the investigation into Flynn regarding his late-December conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding sanctions was only about making false statements to investigators, not about the conversation itself.
[According to Comey, the president called and invited him for dinner on January 27, which Comey assumed would be attended by other people.
However, it was just him and Trump, which had never happened with the two previous Presidents he served. At this dinner, Comey noted (literally took notes in the car on a secure laptop after this weird dinner) that Trump asked for a pledge of personal loyalty.]
Soon after Mr. Trump took office, he summoned Mr. Comey to the White House. Over dinner on Jan. 27, Mr. Trump asked whether Mr. Comey wanted to keep his job, an unexpected question because F.B.I. directors have 10-year terms, Mr. Trump had already asked him to stay and Mr. Comey had notified his work force that he would.
"My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship,” Mr. Comey wrote. “That concerned me greatly.”
Moments later, Mr. Comey wrote, the president told him, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”
"I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed,” Mr. Comey wrote. “We simply looked at each other in silence.”
"I need loyalty,” Mr. Trump repeated.
"You will always get honesty from me,” Mr. Comey says he replied.
"That’s what I want,” Mr. Trump said. “Honest loyalty.”
Mr. Comey said he paused and said the president would have it. “I decided it wouldn’t be productive to push it further,” Mr. Comey wrote. “The term — honest loyalty — had helped end a very awkward conversation and my explanations had made clear what he should expect.”
On February 14, Trump ended an Oval Office meeting on terrorism and asked everyone, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to leave. Alone with Comey in the Oval Office, Trump says, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” According to the memo, Trump tells Comey that Flynn had done nothing wrong. Comey does not say anything to Trump about halting the investigation, replying only: “I agree he is a good guy.”
Among the other reasons, Comey says [he took notes], is that they were alone and that the subject matter pertained to a highly sensitive ongoing investigation.
On March 30, Mr. Comey said, he received a call in his office from the president. “He described the Russia investigation as ‘a cloud’ that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country,” Mr. Comey wrote. Mr. Trump denied many of the sensational and unverified claims in the dossier, including any involvement with Russian prostitutes. He encouraged Mr. Comey to “lift the cloud” by saying publicly that he was not under investigation. Mr. Comey did not do so.
[Allegedly the Russians might have a video recording of Trump in Moscow securing the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama, whom he hated, had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia. He then went about defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.]
Mr. Comey said he turned over his memos to the Justice Department special counsel, Mr. Mueller, the first public suggestion that the special counsel would investigate Mr. Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey.
Some in Congress have suggested that Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice by firing Mr. Comey. Mr. Mueller has the authority to investigate obstruction. That is not a guarantee that Mr. Mueller will investigate the president but is a sign that he is reviewing the memos.
Mr. Comey said he wrote memos on every interaction with the president.
“No sir,” Comey says, denying Trump’s assertion that their one-on-one dinner at the White House in January was at Comey’s initiation and because he wanted to keep his job.
[Senator] Risch had dismissed Trump’s “I hope you can let this go…” statement as a suggestion, not an order. But Comey says he interpreted it – coming from the president – as a directive.
“Quite frankly, the president has informed about six billion people [on Twitter] he’s not quite fond of this investigation,” Senator Lankford of Oklahoma says, seeking to compare Trump’s public comments on the inquiry to the private ones he made to Comey. Comey emphasizes: There’s a difference.
Senator Lankford continued: "This seems like a pretty light touch” that Trump used to get Comey to drop the Flynn investigation, Lankford says, noting that no other member of his administration followed up nor did the president return to the request again.
Comey argues that the effect was profound nonetheless, given the context – Trump kicking everyone out of the room to look him in the eye and ask him to drop it. If F.B.I. agents had known about it, he says, “There’s a real risk of a chilling effect on their work.” Again, key questions about what constitutes obstruction.
Comey recounts how he came to the decision not to inform anyone else outside the senior F.B.I. leadership of his disturbing exchange with Trump. Comey says colleagues at the F.B.I. were “as shocked and troubled as I was” when he informed them of his interactions with Trump. He says it was a struggle what exactly to do with the information, noting there were few Senate-confirmed officials at the Justice Department to whom he could turn. Though he communicated general discomfort to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he never reported the details of his conversations with the president to Justice officials.
How exactly did Attorney General Sessions react when Comey asked not to be left alone with the president, in mid-February? “I don’t remember clearly,” Comey says, careful not to characterize Sessions’ body language and read into it too much. Comey’s clear about one thing: “He didn’t say anything.”
After Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said, “The president never should have cleared the room and he never should have asked you, as you reported, to let it go, to let the investigation go,” she asks why, even if Comey was too stunned to think of it at the time, he didn’t have the Justice Department complain to White House. Comey says he did press in general not to be left alone with the president again, but did not want to “alert the White House” about the specific issue because “it was of investigative interest for us to try to figure out what just happened.” Meaning, he was thinking about obstruction of justice from that moment.
Comey was thinking about potential obstruction by Trump as far back as January. [Comey leaked a memo about a conversation with Trump to the press through a friend of his, a law professor at Columbia University. He did this specifically to provoke the appointment of a special counsel.] That, coupled with what he just said about leaking the memo expressly so a special counsel would be named really fill out a more complete picture here. He laid out a very careful strategy with that in mind.
Mr. Comey acknowledged that he orchestrated the leak that revealed his account of his conversation with Mr. Trump in which the president asked him to drop the investigation into the former national security adviser.
Mr. Comey said he decided to make the conversation public through an intermediary after Mr. Trump said on Twitter that the former F.B.I. director had better hope there were no tapes of their discussions. He said he did so with the explicit hope of prompting the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian election interference.
"I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, ‘cause it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation; there might be a tape,” Mr. Comey said, referring to May 15. “And my judgment was I needed to get that out in the public square so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. So I asked a close friend of mine to do it.”
[Did Russia interfere with the 2016 Presidential election?] “There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever,” Comey says. Russia interfered in the presidential election “with purpose,” and “that’s about as un-fake as you can get.”
“This is a big deal and people need to recognize it,” Comey says about Russia’s interference in last year’s election, displaying the most emotion he has so far today. “They’re coming after Americans,” he says. “They will be back, because we remain – as difficult as we can be with each other – we remain that shining city on the hill.”
Comey also says that he had no conversation with President Trump about the interference or how to avoid a repeat. [In other words, Trump only cared if he himself was under investigation as opposed to whether or not the Russians interfered with US elections or what could be done about it.]
Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, seizing on the he said-he said element, asks: “Who should we believe?”
You can’t cherry-pick facts and statements from different witnesses, Comey says: Watch for consistency in a person’s characterizations. So far, his testimony has closely followed the details laid out yesterday in his seven pages of prepared testimony.
It was an implicit rebuttal of the White House and Republican line on Comey’s testimony – that everyone should pay attention to and accept his assertion that Trump was not himself under investigation, and essentially reject every single other thing he is saying.
[Comey told Trump three times that he personally was not under investigation.] Comey on why he volunteered to Trump that he wasn’t under investigation: “I was very conscious of being in kind of a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation. I was very keen not to leave him with the impression that the bureau was trying to do something to him.” Comey is basically saying he was trying to make it clear to Trump that there was no attempt to blackmail him or undercut him, which shows a keen understanding of how the president thinks. Trump often uses the term “witch hunt,” and has clearly interpreted the Russia investigation into a personal attack on him.
[Trump wanted Comey to say this in public, but Comey refused due to a duty to correct. This means that if Trump became part of the investigation of his own campaign (which was likely), regardless of whether he was simply being asked for information or a subject of investigation, Comey would be obligated to announce the status change. He would not be able to further clarify anything until the investigation concluded.]
Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, asked Comey what prompted him to inform the president he was not personally under investigation, as Comey said he first did on Jan. 6 at Trump Tower, without Trump having directly asked that question.
“My view was that what I said to the president was accurate and fair, and fair to him,” Comey said. He said he drew the line at making such a statement publicly, not wanting to have to correct it should the situation change, and due to “the slippery slope problem.”
Mr. Comey acknowledged for the first time that the F.B.I. was scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s actions.
He said Mr. Trump’s conduct fell within “the scope of” the F.B.I.’s investigation but that he was not specifically under investigation.The F.B.I. is investigating whether anyone in Mr. Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian agents to try to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
Comey says he doesn’t know why he was fired but would take president’s word that he was dismissed over his handling of the Russia investigation.
[The reason given for Comey's termination in the letter was that he had mishandled the situation with then-Secretary Hillary Clinton's email. No one believes that Trump fired Comey for this reason because Secretary Clinton was his opponent and Trump frequently claimed he would "lock her up" because of the email issue being investigated by the FBI if he became president.]
There were a number of questions Comey did not answer because he deemed it inappropriate in a public setting.
Summation of Key Points
Liveblogging
Comey Timeline
The Non-Americans Guide to James Comey's Testimony with Background and Salacious Details
ovidio Here are the Comey highlights, and I tried to add the interesting parts (Russian prostitutes, awkward moments, and dramatic accusations).
There is overlap because I took some things from multiple live bloggers and because multiple Senators questioned him, I grouped them together to make sense.
I only linked my major sources, so if you need one let me know.
YES IT'S LONG. I didn't use stims. :D
[The short version is that, according to Comey's testimony, Trump asked now-former FBI director James Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn (brief explanation below of who he is). Trump also asked him to pledge his loyalty to him and state publicly that he wasn't under investigation by the FBI, which he did privately. Comey didn't commit to either and was fired unceremoniously by Trump.]
--------
Background about Mike Flynn:
He is a former three-star general who retired in 2014 after being forced out as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Trump appointed him as his National Security Advisor. Trump fired Flynn after he ostensibly failed to reveal to vice president Mike Pence that he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia in a December phone call with Moscow’s ambassador to Washington.
President Obama directly warned Trump about Flynn. Now-fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism that she warned the White House counsel Don McGahn that Flynn was open to coercion by the Russians because he did not correctly relay what he discussed to Vice President Pence. During a second conversation, McGahn asks Yates, “Why does it matter to the Department of Justice if one White House official lies to another?” Yates explains that Flynn’s lies make him vulnerable to Russian blackmail because the Russians know that Flynn lied and could probably prove it, which was not desirable in a National Security Advisor. 8)
Flynn's problems are a lot more serious than discussing Russian sanctions and not admitting it.
One set of problems stems from Russia. In 2015, Russian-linked companies paid Mr. Flynn more than $65,000, including about $45,000 from the state-backed Russian television network RT for a December trip to Moscow, where he delivered a speech and sat next to President Vladimir V. Putin at a dinner. Last December, an American wiretap of the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak, intercepted conversations he had with Mr. Flynn discussing the Obama administration’s imposition of sanctions on Russia for meddling in the election.
The other set stems from Turkey. Last year, Mr. Flynn’s lobbying firm, Flynn Intel Group, was paid more than $500,000 by Inovo BV, a Dutch corporation. Inovo is owned by Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish-American businessman with ties to the administration of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. The work centered on research to discredit Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who lives in Pennsylvania, and whose extradition Mr. Erdogan has been seeking.
Possible charges:
•Making false statements knowingly and willfully to the government
•Taking foreign payments without permission
•Failure to register as a foreign agent
•Failure to comply with subpoenas
Flynn
Flynn 2
---------
Key Points:
Mr. Comey testified that President Trump and others in his administration had lied when they said agents had lost confidence in Mr. Comey.
"The administration chose to defame me and more importantly the F.B.I. by saying the organization was in disarray, that it was being poorly led, that the workforce had lost faith in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple.”
[Comey's firing was not handled well. Comey was in Los Angeles for an FBI field office inspection and recruitment event meant to improve diversity in the FBI. TV screens in background flashed news of firing. He thought it was a joke at first.]
Comey says he started documenting conversations with Trump from the start because “I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting.
After discussing his worry that Trump “might lie about the nature of our meeting,” Comey says he didn’t feel the need to contemporaneously document his private conversations with George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
"Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” Mr. Comey said, referring to Mr. Trump’s suggestion [by tweet] that he may have recorded their conversations.
In response to a question from Mr. Burr, Mr. Comey confirmed that Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, was facing a criminal investigation at the time he was fired. That means he was under criminal investigation while serving as the national security adviser, a job that gave him ready access to the president and almost all the secret intelligence possessed by the country’s spy agencies.
The Times reported last month that Mr. Flynn himself warned the Trump transition he was under investigation in early January, more than two weeks before the inauguration. Nonetheless, he was allowed to take up the national security post.
White House officials pushed back on The Times’s story, insisting that the Trump transition — and later, the White House — knew nothing of any criminal investigation, and questioning whether there was even an investigation into Mr. Flynn at the time.
Mr. Comey has now provided public confirmation that there was indeed an investigation underway while Mr. Flynn was serving at the White House.
Under questioning from Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, Comey clarifies the investigation into Flynn regarding his late-December conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding sanctions was only about making false statements to investigators, not about the conversation itself.
[According to Comey, the president called and invited him for dinner on January 27, which Comey assumed would be attended by other people.
However, it was just him and Trump, which had never happened with the two previous Presidents he served. At this dinner, Comey noted (literally took notes in the car on a secure laptop after this weird dinner) that Trump asked for a pledge of personal loyalty.]
Soon after Mr. Trump took office, he summoned Mr. Comey to the White House. Over dinner on Jan. 27, Mr. Trump asked whether Mr. Comey wanted to keep his job, an unexpected question because F.B.I. directors have 10-year terms, Mr. Trump had already asked him to stay and Mr. Comey had notified his work force that he would.
"My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship,” Mr. Comey wrote. “That concerned me greatly.”
Moments later, Mr. Comey wrote, the president told him, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”
"I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed,” Mr. Comey wrote. “We simply looked at each other in silence.”
"I need loyalty,” Mr. Trump repeated.
"You will always get honesty from me,” Mr. Comey says he replied.
"That’s what I want,” Mr. Trump said. “Honest loyalty.”
Mr. Comey said he paused and said the president would have it. “I decided it wouldn’t be productive to push it further,” Mr. Comey wrote. “The term — honest loyalty — had helped end a very awkward conversation and my explanations had made clear what he should expect.”
On February 14, Trump ended an Oval Office meeting on terrorism and asked everyone, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to leave. Alone with Comey in the Oval Office, Trump says, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” According to the memo, Trump tells Comey that Flynn had done nothing wrong. Comey does not say anything to Trump about halting the investigation, replying only: “I agree he is a good guy.”
Among the other reasons, Comey says [he took notes], is that they were alone and that the subject matter pertained to a highly sensitive ongoing investigation.
On March 30, Mr. Comey said, he received a call in his office from the president. “He described the Russia investigation as ‘a cloud’ that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country,” Mr. Comey wrote. Mr. Trump denied many of the sensational and unverified claims in the dossier, including any involvement with Russian prostitutes. He encouraged Mr. Comey to “lift the cloud” by saying publicly that he was not under investigation. Mr. Comey did not do so.
[Allegedly the Russians might have a video recording of Trump in Moscow securing the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama, whom he hated, had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia. He then went about defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.]
Mr. Comey said he turned over his memos to the Justice Department special counsel, Mr. Mueller, the first public suggestion that the special counsel would investigate Mr. Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey.
Some in Congress have suggested that Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice by firing Mr. Comey. Mr. Mueller has the authority to investigate obstruction. That is not a guarantee that Mr. Mueller will investigate the president but is a sign that he is reviewing the memos.
Mr. Comey said he wrote memos on every interaction with the president.
“No sir,” Comey says, denying Trump’s assertion that their one-on-one dinner at the White House in January was at Comey’s initiation and because he wanted to keep his job.
[Senator] Risch had dismissed Trump’s “I hope you can let this go…” statement as a suggestion, not an order. But Comey says he interpreted it – coming from the president – as a directive.
“Quite frankly, the president has informed about six billion people [on Twitter] he’s not quite fond of this investigation,” Senator Lankford of Oklahoma says, seeking to compare Trump’s public comments on the inquiry to the private ones he made to Comey. Comey emphasizes: There’s a difference.
Senator Lankford continued: "This seems like a pretty light touch” that Trump used to get Comey to drop the Flynn investigation, Lankford says, noting that no other member of his administration followed up nor did the president return to the request again.
Comey argues that the effect was profound nonetheless, given the context – Trump kicking everyone out of the room to look him in the eye and ask him to drop it. If F.B.I. agents had known about it, he says, “There’s a real risk of a chilling effect on their work.” Again, key questions about what constitutes obstruction.
Comey recounts how he came to the decision not to inform anyone else outside the senior F.B.I. leadership of his disturbing exchange with Trump. Comey says colleagues at the F.B.I. were “as shocked and troubled as I was” when he informed them of his interactions with Trump. He says it was a struggle what exactly to do with the information, noting there were few Senate-confirmed officials at the Justice Department to whom he could turn. Though he communicated general discomfort to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he never reported the details of his conversations with the president to Justice officials.
How exactly did Attorney General Sessions react when Comey asked not to be left alone with the president, in mid-February? “I don’t remember clearly,” Comey says, careful not to characterize Sessions’ body language and read into it too much. Comey’s clear about one thing: “He didn’t say anything.”
After Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said, “The president never should have cleared the room and he never should have asked you, as you reported, to let it go, to let the investigation go,” she asks why, even if Comey was too stunned to think of it at the time, he didn’t have the Justice Department complain to White House. Comey says he did press in general not to be left alone with the president again, but did not want to “alert the White House” about the specific issue because “it was of investigative interest for us to try to figure out what just happened.” Meaning, he was thinking about obstruction of justice from that moment.
Comey was thinking about potential obstruction by Trump as far back as January. [Comey leaked a memo about a conversation with Trump to the press through a friend of his, a law professor at Columbia University. He did this specifically to provoke the appointment of a special counsel.] That, coupled with what he just said about leaking the memo expressly so a special counsel would be named really fill out a more complete picture here. He laid out a very careful strategy with that in mind.
Mr. Comey acknowledged that he orchestrated the leak that revealed his account of his conversation with Mr. Trump in which the president asked him to drop the investigation into the former national security adviser.
Mr. Comey said he decided to make the conversation public through an intermediary after Mr. Trump said on Twitter that the former F.B.I. director had better hope there were no tapes of their discussions. He said he did so with the explicit hope of prompting the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian election interference.
"I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, ‘cause it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation; there might be a tape,” Mr. Comey said, referring to May 15. “And my judgment was I needed to get that out in the public square so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. So I asked a close friend of mine to do it.”
[Did Russia interfere with the 2016 Presidential election?] “There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever,” Comey says. Russia interfered in the presidential election “with purpose,” and “that’s about as un-fake as you can get.”
“This is a big deal and people need to recognize it,” Comey says about Russia’s interference in last year’s election, displaying the most emotion he has so far today. “They’re coming after Americans,” he says. “They will be back, because we remain – as difficult as we can be with each other – we remain that shining city on the hill.”
Comey also says that he had no conversation with President Trump about the interference or how to avoid a repeat. [In other words, Trump only cared if he himself was under investigation as opposed to whether or not the Russians interfered with US elections or what could be done about it.]
Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, seizing on the he said-he said element, asks: “Who should we believe?”
You can’t cherry-pick facts and statements from different witnesses, Comey says: Watch for consistency in a person’s characterizations. So far, his testimony has closely followed the details laid out yesterday in his seven pages of prepared testimony.
It was an implicit rebuttal of the White House and Republican line on Comey’s testimony – that everyone should pay attention to and accept his assertion that Trump was not himself under investigation, and essentially reject every single other thing he is saying.
[Comey told Trump three times that he personally was not under investigation.] Comey on why he volunteered to Trump that he wasn’t under investigation: “I was very conscious of being in kind of a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation. I was very keen not to leave him with the impression that the bureau was trying to do something to him.” Comey is basically saying he was trying to make it clear to Trump that there was no attempt to blackmail him or undercut him, which shows a keen understanding of how the president thinks. Trump often uses the term “witch hunt,” and has clearly interpreted the Russia investigation into a personal attack on him.
[Trump wanted Comey to say this in public, but Comey refused due to a duty to correct. This means that if Trump became part of the investigation of his own campaign (which was likely), regardless of whether he was simply being asked for information or a subject of investigation, Comey would be obligated to announce the status change. He would not be able to further clarify anything until the investigation concluded.]
Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, asked Comey what prompted him to inform the president he was not personally under investigation, as Comey said he first did on Jan. 6 at Trump Tower, without Trump having directly asked that question.
“My view was that what I said to the president was accurate and fair, and fair to him,” Comey said. He said he drew the line at making such a statement publicly, not wanting to have to correct it should the situation change, and due to “the slippery slope problem.”
Mr. Comey acknowledged for the first time that the F.B.I. was scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s actions.
He said Mr. Trump’s conduct fell within “the scope of” the F.B.I.’s investigation but that he was not specifically under investigation.The F.B.I. is investigating whether anyone in Mr. Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian agents to try to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
Comey says he doesn’t know why he was fired but would take president’s word that he was dismissed over his handling of the Russia investigation.
[The reason given for Comey's termination in the letter was that he had mishandled the situation with then-Secretary Hillary Clinton's email. No one believes that Trump fired Comey for this reason because Secretary Clinton was his opponent and Trump frequently claimed he would "lock her up" because of the email issue being investigated by the FBI if he became president.]
There were a number of questions Comey did not answer because he deemed it inappropriate in a public setting.
Summation of Key Points
Liveblogging
Comey Timeline
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Shimmer.Fade
Bluelighter
This is only a piece of the puzzle. Don't forget what Mueller is up to, and how this under oath testimony gave him a box of ammo. Not to mention the senators and congressmen who now have a better platform from which to move forward. Step by step, and the goal will come in sight.
Fantastic!^^Talk about a third rail!! I think it won't matter how many followers he has, this will mobilize a lot of people.
The Non-Americans Guide to James Comey's Testimony with Background and Salacious Details
ovidio Here are the Comey highlights, and I tried to add the interesting parts (Russian prostitutes, awkward moments, and dramatic accusations).
There is overlap because I took some things from multiple live bloggers and because multiple Senators questioned him, I grouped them together to make sense.
I only linked my major sources, so if you need one let me know.
YES IT'S LONG. I didn't use stims. :D
[The short version is that, according to Comey's testimony, Trump asked now-former FBI director James Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn (brief explanation below of who he is). Trump also asked him to pledge his loyalty to him and state publicly that he wasn't under investigation by the FBI, which he did privately. Comey didn't commit to either and was fired unceremoniously by Trump.]
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Background about Mike Flynn:
He is a former three-star general who retired in 2014 after being forced out as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Trump appointed him as his National Security Advisor. Trump fired Flynn after he ostensibly failed to reveal to vice president Mike Pence that he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia in a December phone call with Moscow’s ambassador to Washington.
President Obama directly warned Trump about Flynn. Now-fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism that she warned the White House counsel Don McGahn that Flynn was open to coercion by the Russians because he did not correctly relay what he discussed to Vice President Pence. During a second conversation, McGahn asks Yates, “Why does it matter to the Department of Justice if one White House official lies to another?” Yates explains that Flynn’s lies make him vulnerable to Russian blackmail because the Russians know that Flynn lied and could probably prove it, which was not desirable in a National Security Advisor. 8)
Flynn's problems are a lot more serious than discussing Russian sanctions and not admitting it.
One set of problems stems from Russia. In 2015, Russian-linked companies paid Mr. Flynn more than $65,000, including about $45,000 from the state-backed Russian television network RT for a December trip to Moscow, where he delivered a speech and sat next to President Vladimir V. Putin at a dinner. Last December, an American wiretap of the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak, intercepted conversations he had with Mr. Flynn discussing the Obama administration’s imposition of sanctions on Russia for meddling in the election.
The other set stems from Turkey. Last year, Mr. Flynn’s lobbying firm, Flynn Intel Group, was paid more than $500,000 by Inovo BV, a Dutch corporation. Inovo is owned by Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish-American businessman with ties to the administration of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. The work centered on research to discredit Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who lives in Pennsylvania, and whose extradition Mr. Erdogan has been seeking.
Possible charges:
•Making false statements knowingly and willfully to the government
•Taking foreign payments without permission
•Failure to register as a foreign agent
•Failure to comply with subpoenas
Flynn
Flynn 2
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Key Points:
Mr. Comey testified that President Trump and others in his administration had lied when they said agents had lost confidence in Mr. Comey.
"The administration chose to defame me and more importantly the F.B.I. by saying the organization was in disarray, that it was being poorly led, that the workforce had lost faith in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple.”
[Comey's firing was not handled well. Comey was in Los Angeles for an FBI field office inspection and recruitment event meant to improve diversity in the FBI. TV screens in background flashed news of firing. He thought it was a joke at first.]
Comey says he started documenting conversations with Trump from the start because “I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting.
After discussing his worry that Trump “might lie about the nature of our meeting,” Comey says he didn’t feel the need to contemporaneously document his private conversations with George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
"Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” Mr. Comey said, referring to Mr. Trump’s suggestion [by tweet] that he may have recorded their conversations.
In response to a question from Mr. Burr, Mr. Comey confirmed that Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, was facing a criminal investigation at the time he was fired. That means he was under criminal investigation while serving as the national security adviser, a job that gave him ready access to the president and almost all the secret intelligence possessed by the country’s spy agencies.
The Times reported last month that Mr. Flynn himself warned the Trump transition he was under investigation in early January, more than two weeks before the inauguration. Nonetheless, he was allowed to take up the national security post.
White House officials pushed back on The Times’s story, insisting that the Trump transition — and later, the White House — knew nothing of any criminal investigation, and questioning whether there was even an investigation into Mr. Flynn at the time.
Mr. Comey has now provided public confirmation that there was indeed an investigation underway while Mr. Flynn was serving at the White House.
Under questioning from Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, Comey clarifies the investigation into Flynn regarding his late-December conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding sanctions was only about making false statements to investigators, not about the conversation itself.
[According to Comey, the president called and invited him for dinner on January 27, which Comey assumed would be attended by other people.
However, it was just him and Trump, which had never happened with the two previous Presidents he served. At this dinner, Comey noted (literally took notes in the car on a secure laptop after this weird dinner) that Trump asked for a pledge of personal loyalty.]
Soon after Mr. Trump took office, he summoned Mr. Comey to the White House. Over dinner on Jan. 27, Mr. Trump asked whether Mr. Comey wanted to keep his job, an unexpected question because F.B.I. directors have 10-year terms, Mr. Trump had already asked him to stay and Mr. Comey had notified his work force that he would.
"My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship,” Mr. Comey wrote. “That concerned me greatly.”
Moments later, Mr. Comey wrote, the president told him, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”
"I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed,” Mr. Comey wrote. “We simply looked at each other in silence.”
"I need loyalty,” Mr. Trump repeated.
"You will always get honesty from me,” Mr. Comey says he replied.
"That’s what I want,” Mr. Trump said. “Honest loyalty.”
Mr. Comey said he paused and said the president would have it. “I decided it wouldn’t be productive to push it further,” Mr. Comey wrote. “The term — honest loyalty — had helped end a very awkward conversation and my explanations had made clear what he should expect.”
On February 14, Trump ended an Oval Office meeting on terrorism and asked everyone, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to leave. Alone with Comey in the Oval Office, Trump says, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” According to the memo, Trump tells Comey that Flynn had done nothing wrong. Comey does not say anything to Trump about halting the investigation, replying only: “I agree he is a good guy.”
Among the other reasons, Comey says [he took notes], is that they were alone and that the subject matter pertained to a highly sensitive ongoing investigation.
On March 30, Mr. Comey said, he received a call in his office from the president. “He described the Russia investigation as ‘a cloud’ that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country,” Mr. Comey wrote. Mr. Trump denied many of the sensational and unverified claims in the dossier, including any involvement with Russian prostitutes. He encouraged Mr. Comey to “lift the cloud” by saying publicly that he was not under investigation. Mr. Comey did not do so.
[Allegedly the Russians might have a video recording of Trump in Moscow securing the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama, whom he hated, had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia. He then went about defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.]
Mr. Comey said he turned over his memos to the Justice Department special counsel, Mr. Mueller, the first public suggestion that the special counsel would investigate Mr. Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey.
Some in Congress have suggested that Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice by firing Mr. Comey. Mr. Mueller has the authority to investigate obstruction. That is not a guarantee that Mr. Mueller will investigate the president but is a sign that he is reviewing the memos.
Mr. Comey said he wrote memos on every interaction with the president.
“No sir,” Comey says, denying Trump’s assertion that their one-on-one dinner at the White House in January was at Comey’s initiation and because he wanted to keep his job.
[Senator] Risch had dismissed Trump’s “I hope you can let this go…” statement as a suggestion, not an order. But Comey says he interpreted it – coming from the president – as a directive.
“Quite frankly, the president has informed about six billion people [on Twitter] he’s not quite fond of this investigation,” Senator Lankford of Oklahoma says, seeking to compare Trump’s public comments on the inquiry to the private ones he made to Comey. Comey emphasizes: There’s a difference.
Senator Lankford continued: "This seems like a pretty light touch” that Trump used to get Comey to drop the Flynn investigation, Lankford says, noting that no other member of his administration followed up nor did the president return to the request again.
Comey argues that the effect was profound nonetheless, given the context – Trump kicking everyone out of the room to look him in the eye and ask him to drop it. If F.B.I. agents had known about it, he says, “There’s a real risk of a chilling effect on their work.” Again, key questions about what constitutes obstruction.
Comey recounts how he came to the decision not to inform anyone else outside the senior F.B.I. leadership of his disturbing exchange with Trump. Comey says colleagues at the F.B.I. were “as shocked and troubled as I was” when he informed them of his interactions with Trump. He says it was a struggle what exactly to do with the information, noting there were few Senate-confirmed officials at the Justice Department to whom he could turn. Though he communicated general discomfort to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he never reported the details of his conversations with the president to Justice officials.
How exactly did Attorney General Sessions react when Comey asked not to be left alone with the president, in mid-February? “I don’t remember clearly,” Comey says, careful not to characterize Sessions’ body language and read into it too much. Comey’s clear about one thing: “He didn’t say anything.”
After Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said, “The president never should have cleared the room and he never should have asked you, as you reported, to let it go, to let the investigation go,” she asks why, even if Comey was too stunned to think of it at the time, he didn’t have the Justice Department complain to White House. Comey says he did press in general not to be left alone with the president again, but did not want to “alert the White House” about the specific issue because “it was of investigative interest for us to try to figure out what just happened.” Meaning, he was thinking about obstruction of justice from that moment.
Comey was thinking about potential obstruction by Trump as far back as January. [Comey leaked a memo about a conversation with Trump to the press through a friend of his, a law professor at Columbia University. He did this specifically to provoke the appointment of a special counsel.] That, coupled with what he just said about leaking the memo expressly so a special counsel would be named really fill out a more complete picture here. He laid out a very careful strategy with that in mind.
Mr. Comey acknowledged that he orchestrated the leak that revealed his account of his conversation with Mr. Trump in which the president asked him to drop the investigation into the former national security adviser.
Mr. Comey said he decided to make the conversation public through an intermediary after Mr. Trump said on Twitter that the former F.B.I. director had better hope there were no tapes of their discussions. He said he did so with the explicit hope of prompting the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian election interference.
"I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, ‘cause it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation; there might be a tape,” Mr. Comey said, referring to May 15. “And my judgment was I needed to get that out in the public square so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. So I asked a close friend of mine to do it.”
[Did Russia interfere with the 2016 Presidential election?] “There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever,” Comey says. Russia interfered in the presidential election “with purpose,” and “that’s about as un-fake as you can get.”
“This is a big deal and people need to recognize it,” Comey says about Russia’s interference in last year’s election, displaying the most emotion he has so far today. “They’re coming after Americans,” he says. “They will be back, because we remain – as difficult as we can be with each other – we remain that shining city on the hill.”
Comey also says that he had no conversation with President Trump about the interference or how to avoid a repeat. [In other words, Trump only cared if he himself was under investigation as opposed to whether or not the Russians interfered with US elections or what could be done about it.]
Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, seizing on the he said-he said element, asks: “Who should we believe?”
You can’t cherry-pick facts and statements from different witnesses, Comey says: Watch for consistency in a person’s characterizations. So far, his testimony has closely followed the details laid out yesterday in his seven pages of prepared testimony.
It was an implicit rebuttal of the White House and Republican line on Comey’s testimony – that everyone should pay attention to and accept his assertion that Trump was not himself under investigation, and essentially reject every single other thing he is saying.
[Comey told Trump three times that he personally was not under investigation.] Comey on why he volunteered to Trump that he wasn’t under investigation: “I was very conscious of being in kind of a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation. I was very keen not to leave him with the impression that the bureau was trying to do something to him.” Comey is basically saying he was trying to make it clear to Trump that there was no attempt to blackmail him or undercut him, which shows a keen understanding of how the president thinks. Trump often uses the term “witch hunt,” and has clearly interpreted the Russia investigation into a personal attack on him.
[Trump wanted Comey to say this in public, but Comey refused due to a duty to correct. This means that if Trump became part of the investigation of his own campaign (which was likely), regardless of whether he was simply being asked for information or a subject of investigation, Comey would be obligated to announce the status change. He would not be able to further clarify anything until the investigation concluded.]
Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, asked Comey what prompted him to inform the president he was not personally under investigation, as Comey said he first did on Jan. 6 at Trump Tower, without Trump having directly asked that question.
“My view was that what I said to the president was accurate and fair, and fair to him,” Comey said. He said he drew the line at making such a statement publicly, not wanting to have to correct it should the situation change, and due to “the slippery slope problem.”
Mr. Comey acknowledged for the first time that the F.B.I. was scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s actions.
He said Mr. Trump’s conduct fell within “the scope of” the F.B.I.’s investigation but that he was not specifically under investigation.The F.B.I. is investigating whether anyone in Mr. Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian agents to try to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
Comey says he doesn’t know why he was fired but would take president’s word that he was dismissed over his handling of the Russia investigation.
[The reason given for Comey's termination in the letter was that he had mishandled the situation with then-Secretary Hillary Clinton's email. No one believes that Trump fired Comey for this reason because Secretary Clinton was his opponent and Trump frequently claimed he would "lock her up" because of the email issue being investigated by the FBI if he became president.]
There were a number of questions Comey did not answer because he deemed it inappropriate in a public setting.
Summation of Key Points
Liveblogging
Comey Timeline
Thanks so much for taking the time to educate me, I learned a lot
I'll need a little while to digest this though
cduggles
Bluelight Crew
^^ Great! I hope it's not too dry. I tried to give it some flair.
LucidSDreamr
Bluelighter
but trump ran his campaign on removing the ACA, yet they still voted for him knowing they would lost their insurance, what could possibly motivate them to do such a thing besides hate?
perhaps people just thought that they would all get good jobs because trump was going to bring jobs back bigly.... because they figured they would get their manufacturing jobs back again and then be able to afford insurance?
Does anyone think this DC and maryland suit against trump for accepting money into his businesses after he had already assumed office has any substance to it?
I didn't start paying attention to politics until the bush jr presidency...but has there every been so much scandal so quickly for a president?
if this is just the first few months it will be interesting to see what the next years hold if he makes it that far
IMPEACH THE PEACH!!!
- Status