Thanks for that very readable and informative presentation. It does give the appearance that Comey went out of his way to harm Trump while not incriminating himself. He’s a conniving guy, for sure.
I totally, completely agree with you that he’s a Democrat operative. And elsewhere it looks like his ‘mass of contradictions,’ caught up with him. He outright lied to his motivation for leaking the memo. He said it happened as a direct result of Trump’s comment about the tape recordings...a comment Trump made three days AFTER Comey leaked the memo.
Mr. I’ll-smear-Trump-without-incriminating-myseld didn’t do so well. His fat’s in the fire. The next few days should be very interesting.
COLLINS: OK, you mentioned that, from your very first meeting with the president, you decided to write a memo memorializing the conversation. What was it about that very first meeting that made you write a memo, when you had not done that with two previous presidents?The first meeting, the January 6 Briefing, was engineered to be one-on-one by Comey. Check out his prepared statement on that. The reason to keep the group small was that the subject was the piss-dossier, and the big shots didn't want to subject Trump to embarassment by having more people around when the discussion/disclosure took place. Here is Comey in his own words ...COMEY: As I said, a combination of things. A gut feeling is an important overlay on it (ph). But the circumstances -- that I was alone, the subject matter, and the nature of the person that I was interacting with and my read of that person.
(UNKNOWN): The nature of that person (ph)?
COMEY: Yeah, and -- and -- and, really, just a gut feel, laying on top of all of that, that this -- it's going to be important, to protect this organization, that I make records of this.
The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.And today, Comey conveniently side stepped the question "The nature of that person?" What the heck? He makes a statement about his impression of "the nature of Trump" and nobody presses him to expand on WTF that means, in his mind.The Director of National Intelligence asked that I personally do this portion of the briefing because I was staying in my position and because the material implicated the FBI's counter-intelligence responsibilities. We also agreed I would do it alone to minimize potential embarrassment to the President-Elect.
Richard Cohen: James Comey a bad choice for FBI - WaPo OPINION piece - July 1, 2013
Comey, too, is a hard-charger. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page compiled an impressive list of Comey's prosecutorial excesses, including the prosecution of two lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee under the 1917 Espionage Act. The case was finally dropped, but not before both men lost their jobs, a whole lot of money and, I would suspect, a whole lot of sleep. ...The OpEd goes on to say Comey is not a bad man. I disagree. Comey is a bad man. He will stab you in the back, he is a liar, he is (as you say) conniving, and he is duplicitous.Comey has exercised his power in disturbing ways. Just as Obama overlooked Eric Holder's role in the 2001 Marc Rich pardon, the president is now overlooking the warning signs in Comey's record -- ticks of a disturbing zealotry.