Random Politics & Religion #24

Actually, I'm going by what he said on record, during a Congressional Hearing on May 8th, that states that nobody pressured him into stopping the investigation, and this written statement, which is about to go on record, saying that he "felt pressured" at the time he met with Trump on February 14th.

So, did he lie on his statement he is about to put into public record, or did he just perjure himself from his statement on public record?

Which is it Pleebs?

Pretty sure he was answering a question about the DoJ, not Trump.

Not in my experience. Because it would be a big deal to tell the FBI to stop doing something that — without an appropriate purpose. I mean where oftentimes they give us opinions that we don't see a case there and so you ought to stop investing resources in it. But I'm talking about a situation where we were told to stop something for a political reason, that would be a very big deal. It's not happened in my experience.

Easily neither. He will just say he never felt pressured to end the Russian investigation as a whole, but he was pressed to drop the Mike Flynn angle. Pretty simple.

Not in my experience. Because it would be a big deal to tell the FBI to stop doing something that — without an appropriate purpose. I mean where oftentimes they give us opinions that we don't see a case there and so you ought to stop investing resources in it. But I'm talking about a situation where we were told to stop something for a political reason, that would be a very big deal. It's not happened in my experience.

Well, thats what he is gonna say, and its not gonna be perjury, so, anything else?

Amazing how dishonest you are. Here is the question that was asked

"Hirono: "So if the Attorney General or senior officials at the Department of Justice opposes a specific investigation, can they halt that FBI investigation?"

Not in my experience. Because it would be a big deal to tell the FBI to stop doing something that — without an appropriate purpose. I mean where oftentimes they give us opinions that we don't see a case there and so you ought to stop investing resources in it. But I'm talking about a situation where we were told to stop something for a political reason, that would be a very big deal. It's not happened in my experience.

But I'm talking about a situation where we were told to stop something for a political reason, that would be a very big deal. It's not happened in my experience.

Hirono: "And so speaking of the independence of not just the judiciary but I'd like you to clarify the FBI's independence from the DOJ apparatus. Can the FBI conduct an investigation independent from the department of Justice. Or does the FBI have to disclose all its investigations to the DOJ? And does it have to get the Attorney General's consent?"

Comey: "Well, we work with the Department of Justice, whether that's main Justice or U.S. attorney's offices on all of our investigations.

"And so we work with them and so in a legal sense we're not independent of the Department of Justice. We are spiritually, culturally pretty independent group, and that's the way you would want it. But yes, we work with the Department of Justice on all of our investigations."

Hirono: "So if the Attorney General or senior officials at the Department of Justice opposes a specific investigation, can they halt that FBI investigation?"

Comey: "In theory, yes."

Hirono: "Has it happened?"

Comey: "Not in my experience. Because it would be a big deal to tell the FBI to stop doing something that — without an appropriate purpose. I mean where oftentimes they give us opinions that we don't see a case there and so you ought to stop investing resources in it. But I'm talking about a situation where we were told to stop something for a political reason, that would be a very big deal. It's not happened in my experience."

Stuff

It won't be perjury because he was answering a very specific question.

Do you want the Shiori treatment?

Should I quadruple quote, ending with rainbow text?

Taking a quote from context and color coding it doesn't make you right.

You can tell KN is really gonna be spinning his wheels on this one, lol.

You can tell KN is really gonna be spinning his wheels on this one, lol.

I can't expect you to bring up any counterpoints, or show any reasoning behind your "no u" posts.

I do feel like a broken record though, since I have to keep saying the same thing over and over again, since you reality deniers keep putting your heads in the sand and/or up your ***.

Ahead of former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, the committee released the seven-page prepared statement Comey provided on Wednesday. While it’s clear that Comey and his allies believe the statement is proof that President Donald Trump acted inappropriately, and perhaps even illegally, the statement itself is a much bigger indictment of Comey’s own behavior over the last six months. Not only does Comey’s statement corroborate Trump’s claim that the former FBI director told him three times that the president was not being investigated by the FBI, it also reveals the Beltway game Comey was playing with the investigation.

In his statement, as my colleague Mollie Hemingway noted earlier today, Comey acknowledges the accuracy of Trump’s claim — included in the letter announcing Comey’s firing — that Comey had on three separate occasions informed Trump that he was not being investigated by the FBI. The corroboration of the claim by Comey himself is by far the most newsworthy nugget from the lengthy statement. But several other claims from Comey also do far more to indict Comey than they do to implicate Trump.

The most damning aspect of Comey’s prepared testimony is his admission that he deliberately refused to inform the public that Trump was not being personally investigated by the FBI. Comey’s justification for this refusal to publicly disclose material facts — that those facts might change — is laughable, especially in light of Comey’s 2016 two-step regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton.

“I did not tell the President that the FBI and the Department of Justice had been reluctant to make public statements that we did not have an open case on President Trump for a number of reasons, most importantly because it would create a duty to correct, should that change,” Comey claims.

Recall that in 2016, Comey had no problem 1) publicly exonerating Hillary Clinton despite the fact that the authority to charge (or not charge) someone with a crime lies with federal prosecutors, not the FBI; 2) using the same press conference to excoriate Clinton’s behavior; 3) telling Congress that the investigation of Clinton was closed; and then 4) announcing days before a presidential election that the FBI had reopened the case and was once again investigating Hillary Clinton. Yet we’re supposed to believe that James Comey had grave moral concerns about disclosing facts that may be subject to change? Please.

If anything, Comey’s latest statement only highlights why Trump was justified in firing Comey in the first place. Comey, according to his own testimony, repeatedly told Trump that the president was not being investigated by the FBI. Not only that, Comey also told Congress that Trump was not being personally investigated. How on earth is it inappropriate, in light of those facts, for the president to ask for those facts to be made public by the very individual asserting them? Trump’s exasperation looks far more justifiable given the behavior to which Comey admits in his own testimony, largely because Comey’s tortured explanation for refusing to publicly explain those facts, even after disclosing them to Congress, holds so little water.

“I explained [to Trump] that we had briefed the leadership of Congress on exactly which individuals we were investigating and that we had told those Congressional leaders that we were not personally investigating President Trump,” Comey writes. “I reminded him I had previously told him that.”

Rather than elevating Comey’s moral stature, the statement he provided only makes him look smaller, and makes the game he was playing that much more obvious. According to his own testimony, Comey repeatedly told the president that the FBI was not investigating him. That’s exactly what you’d expect from a careerist looking to keep his job. It’s why Comey, in his own tortured words, pledged “honest loyalty” to Trump during a private meeting.

If the conversation with Trump had really bothered Comey all that much, he would’ve walked out and quit on the spot. Instead, he did what all ambitious bureaucrats eager to keep their jobs do: he stayed, he pledged his loyalty, and he went home and wrote up a self-serving CYA memo just in case. Here’s how Comey describes what happened:


Really, Jim? Really? That’s how you’re going to try to argue around the fact that you personally pledged your loyalty to the president, only to decide after you were fired that it made you feel icky? And your rationalization of the whole thing is that maybe you understood the phrase “honest loyalty” differently than the president?

Not until after he was fired did Comey suddenly decide to inform the public of all these interactions that he said made him so uncomfortable. Comey’s similar refusal during his tenure to inform the public that the president was not being investigated is also clear evidence of the keep-my-job-at-all-costs game he was playing (if this game looks familiar, it’s the exact same one he played when he took the fall for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s refusal to prosecute Clinton in 2016). What better way to insure yourself against being fired than to give the impression that you are overseeing a grave investigation of potential wrongdoing by your boss?

The public impression that Trump was being criminally investigated, amplified by the president’s critics in the media, was effectively Comey’s get-out-of-jail-free card. The former FBI director likely assumed that no president would be crazy enough to fire a man whom the public believed to be investigating the president. Only a madman would fire that guy, right? Everyone in Washington knows how this game is played. They all know the tune by heart.

Unfortunately for Comey, Trump had no intention of playing that game and dancing that dance. What really happened is that Trump was wise to Comey’s con and finally had enough of it. He figured out what Comey was doing — deliberately refusing to correct a factually inaccurate impression of the FBI’s ongoing investigation as a means of protecting his job — and called his bluff.

Comey’s own words reveal in lurid detail the game he was playing. They reveal that Trump’s claims about the investigation, and his claims about Comey’s characterization of the investigation, were completely accurate. They reveal that Trump was giving one impression in private and allowing an entirely different one to gain currency in public. Comey’s mistake wasn’t in thinking the Beltway two-step was the best way to keep his job. His mistake was assuming that Trump wouldn’t dare to stop dancing.