Trump’s defenders will be trying to portray Trump’s pressuring Comey to drop the Flynn investigation as an isolated incident, a president who simply didn’t know any better going a bit too far trying to get a friend off the hook.
.. The president asked Comey, then the F.B.I. director, to pledge his loyalty and to shut down one part of the investigation. When the director didn’t comply, he was fired.
And the intelligence committee hearing on all of this proceeded like it was just another partisan fight about tax cuts. The word “surreal” comes to mind.
.. the specific takeaway is actually something we already knew: Comey said: “I take the president, at his word, that I was fired because of the Russia investigation. Something about the way I was conducting it, the president felt created pressure on him that he wanted to relieve.” Comey was clear Trump didn’t ask him to stop the Russia investigation. But the president wanted to change the course of what the F.B.I. was doing. In this context, whatever his rationale, and whether or not he broke the law, is that acceptable conduct for an American president?
.. including a cryptic reference by Trump to the “the McCabe thing,” suggesting that our president might have his cross hairs on the acting FBI director.
.. The statement by Trump’s lawyer that the president feels “completely and totally vindicated” by Comey’s testimony was particularly bizarre given that Trump and the White House had both flatly denied the president ever made such a request. True, Comey’s testimony confirms that as of March 30, the F.B.I. wasn’t investigating Trump himself, but that’s hardly proof of innocence. After all, as Comey points out, that could change.
.. David French describes Comey’s account of the exchange in which Trump asked him for loyalty and concludes:
“There’s no serious argument that this is appropriate behavior from an American president. Imagine for a moment testimony that President Barack Obama or a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton had a similar conversation with an F.B.I. director. The entire conservative-media world would erupt in outrage, and rightly so. The F.B.I. director is a law-enforcement officer, loyal to the Constitution, not the president’s consigliere.”
.. The Department of Justice has long taken the position that criminal charges can’t be brought against a sitting president because that would “undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions”
.. Attorney General Jeff Sessions couldn’t bring charges even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t.
.. an aggressive accusation that the Trump administration “defamed” him and the agency to justify his firing. “Those were lies, plain and simple,”
.. Comey wants to be providing the facts, and his gut reaction — “disturbing” — while leaving the legal conclusions to the senators questioning him, and to Bob Mueller
.. Rich Lowry’s argument in Politico that Comey’s willingness to talk about ongoing investigations helps explain why Trump thought he could ask Comey to publicly say that the president himself wasn’t under investigation.
.. there something to the underlying idea, that Comey himself scrambled the rules for what should and shouldn’t be public, in the context of a highly politicized F.B.I. investigation?
.. how telling is it that the former director of the F.B.I. testified that he felt he needed to document every encounter with Trump because, given “the nature of the person,” he felt Trump might lie? He actually used the “L” word!
.. Trump is right about the “cloud” hanging over him. Comey set a bad precedent last summer and I hope the F.B.I. ditches it.
.. Senator Marco Rubio’s line of questioning, is that the defense of Trump is taking form
.. One Comey subtheme is Sessions’s failure to protect the F.B.I’s independence from the White House.
.. it sounds like Sessions is more mixed up in the Russia investigation than we know.
.. And if it turns out the campaign assisted Russia in any way, that’s a political crime that would make the Watergate break-in look benign.
.. He didn’t order Comey to shut down the whole Russia investigation, he merely asked Comey to shut down the inquiry into Flynn
.. I’ll stipulate that much of Comey’s conduct strikes me as bizarre: The vicarious leaking of his memo probably tops that list, and his reason for not alerting Sessions of Trump’s misconduct, at a time when Sessions was still overseeing the Russia investigation, is pretty thin.
.. I’m still getting my mind around Comey’s statement that he asked a friend (Dan Richman, a Columbia University law professor has confirmed he was that person) to leak Comey’s memo about Trump to the press in order to trigger the appointment of a special counsel. Wow! Trump doesn’t play chess, but that’s what Comey was doing. It also suggests that he didn’t think the Justice Department should handle the investigation through normal channels.
How Gen. Michael Flynn Became A Central Figure In The Russia Hacking Scandal
GROSS: Can we just add that he also asked Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence…
ROSENBERG: Of course.
GROSS: …And Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, to publicly deny any – that there was any collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign?
ROSENBERG: Yeah. And I think that’s – you know, that also brings us to an issue that I think we see here, which is that it’s not clear the White House understands where politics is supposed to end, that in these jobs when it’s the director of the CIA, the director of national intelligence, they are appointed by the president. So there’s obviously politics in their appointment, but they’re not political jobs.
Former CIA Chief Brennan Says Russians Were in Contact With Trump Campaign Associates
Brennan said Russia ‘brazenly’ interfered in the presidential election despite a direct warning to a top Kremlin official
..“I encountered and I’m aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign,” said Mr. Brennan, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency under former President Barack Obama, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee.Mr. Brennan said he didn’t know if these contacts by people tied to the campaign amounted to “collusion” with Russian officials.
But, he said, “I know that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials,” said Mr. Brennan.
.. Mr. Brennan described a previously undisclosed warning he made to his counterpart in Russian intelligence, Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the Russian FSB intelligence service, not to interfere in the U.S. election in an August phone call
..The Washington Post reported Monday that the president asked Mr. Coats and the National Security Agency director, Adm. Mike Rogers, to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
Russia probe reaches current White House official, people familiar with the case say
The senior White House adviser under scrutiny by investigators is someone close to the president, according to these people, who would not further identify the official.
.. the investigative work now being done by the FBI also includes determining whether any financial crimes were committed by people close to the president.
.. The Flynn Intel Group was paid for research on Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who Turkey’s current president believes was responsible for a coup attempt last summer.
.. Flynn is being investigated by the Pentagon’s top watchdog for his foreign payments. Flynn also received $45,000 to appear in 2015 with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a dinner for RT
.. The White House also has acknowledged that Kushner met with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, in late November. Kushner also has acknowledged that he met with the head of a Russian development bank, Vnesheconombank, which has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014. The president’s son-in-law initially omitted contacts with foreign leaders from a national security questionnaire,
.. in early 2015, a man purporting to be one of its New York-based employees was arrested and accused of being an unregistered spy.
.. Evgeny Buryakov — ultimately pleaded guilty and was eventually deported. He had been in contact with former Trump adviser Carter