I was a guest on the Crane Durham Nothing But Truth radio show on Wednesday night, May 10, 2017, talking about the firing of James Comey the prior Tuesday.
My interview is almost 30 minutes, and is embedded at the bottom of this post. In the day since the interview there have been further developments which support many of the points I made.
In particular, Donald Trump has been interviewed on NBC and focused heavily on Comey’s media presence: “He’s a showboat, he’s a grandstander.” That’s a point I made in the interview in similar (but not identical) terms.
Additionally, Acting Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe testified before Congress, and confirmed that the investigation is continuing uninterrupted, there has been no attempt at interference, the FBI has adequate resources, and the FBI would notify Congress if there ever were an attempt to interfere. In other words, removing Comey has no substantive impact on the investigation.
Here are excerpts from my interview.
On the issue of timing, and complaints by Chuck Schumer that the timing was political:
“There’s no good timing that would satisfy Chuck Schumer. You could pick any point in time from the day Donald Trump was sworn into office until today, and there’s no day when Chuck Schumer would not have objected, would not have said it’s political. Whatever investigations are going on have been going on for months, so there’s never a good time to do it. I think the timing was ripe in that now President Trump has his team in place at the Department of Justice, it took a while to get Jeff Sessions confirmed, now this other person [Rod Rosenstein] is there, the Deputy Attorney General who wrote that memo suggesting that Comey should be fired, so now is the time. It could have been next week or it could have been a week ago, but there is no time that the Democrats would not have objected. Which of course is ironic since they’ve been screaming for Comey to be fired at least since October.”* * *”I don’t think the timing issue is significant at all. Can you imagine if he had fired the day he was inaugurated or the next day? The headlines would be screaming “His first act in office was to remove the person investigating him. There’s no good time to have done it. Could it have been done earlier? Maybe. Could it have been done later? Maybe. Those are judgment calls that the executive branch gets to make for an FBI Director, and I see no issue with it now.”
On whether the firing interfered with the investigation:
“People are acting like just because James Comey is gone, the FBI comes to a standstill, whatever investigation their doing no longer takes place. That’s a presumption which is simply not true…. The entire premise, that terminating Comey terminates the investigation, is faulty. So this is just layer upon layer of what the Democrats are doing to come up with excuses.”* * *”Whatever investigation was going on yesterday is going on today and will go on tomorrow. There is no reason to think it has been interrupted because James Comey is no longer there.”
On Comey’s public personna:
“He made himself a media celebrity. Everybody’s waiting on what is the next thing James Comey is going to say…. What did he say? How did he say it? What was the tone of voice? What was his expression. It’s like the whole political arena was being run by the Director of the FBI. That’s not the role of the Director of the FBI. So it was long past time for him to go…. He had become too much of a media celebrity, and he was driving the news cycle way too much.”
On the July 5, 2016 press conference announcing no charges against Hillary:
“He did a very effective job. I remember watching it live because we were covering it live at the website, and for the first 14 minutes or whatever the exact time was, it was, oh my goodness, he’s going to announce that he’s recommending prosecution, this is unbelievable, he has just filleted Hillary in public …. And then at the very end, he used the word “but,” and as soon as he used that word, I knew what was coming…. When he announced it [no prosecution recommendation] with all the cameras there, he effectively made the decision…. He usurped the role that others have in the process ….”
On the big picture and “constitutional crisis” hyperbole:
“People need to stop hyperventilating. There is no constitutional crisis here. The FBI is still intact. The Justice Department is still intact. The normal processes are still intact.”
Here’s the full interview. Can you handle 28 minutes and 26 seconds of nothing but truth?
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