Comey Memos Puncture Collusion and Obstruction Narratives
#TheResistance media hardest hit
Congress received the memos from former FBI Director James Comey on his meetings with President Donald Trump. What I found interesting is what is not in the memos: Evidence of collusion or an attempt to obstruct the FBI.
Loyalty
The first meeting between the men happened on January 6, 2017. In that meeting, Comey told Trump that “the Russians allegedly had tapes involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013.” You know, the infamous “golden showers” portion of the dossier. Trump replied that “there were no prostitutes, there were never prostitutes.”
Comey told Trump that media outlets like CNN and others had the information, but that “it was important that we not give them an excuse to write that the FBI has the material or” something else that is blacked out. He told Trump that the FBI was “keeping it very close-hold.”
Well, after that meeting, the dossier appeared at BuzzFeed and that the intelligence community told Trump about these allegations.
This leads us to the next meeting when Comey dined with Trump at the White House on January 28, 2017. The two men discussed leaks and Comey wrote that Trump like other presidents “would discover the entire government leaks like crazy and explained that it often comes from the first or second hop out from those actually working on the sensitive thing.”
Trump told Comey “that he needed loyalty and expected loyalty.”
Okay, so after this came out, everyone immediately said that Trump demanded loyalty from Comey. But from the sound of it, Trump meant from everyone that surrounds him. It sounds like he doesn’t want leaks to happen and protect sensitive information. Byron York explained at The Washington Examiner:
Why would Trump wonder about the FBI director’s loyalty? Perhaps because in their first meeting, the FBI director dropped the Moscow sex allegation on Trump, followed immediately by its publication in the media. It seems entirely reasonable for a president to wonder what was going on and whether the FBI director was loyal, not to the president personally, but to the confidentiality that is required in his role as head of the nation’s chief investigative agency.
A few more things. We had known earlier that Comey briefed Trump about the dossier one-on-one on January 6, 2017. But it was not until an interview Thursday with CNN’s Jake Tapper that Comey revealed the conversation was only about the Moscow sex allegation. The other parts of the dossier — about Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, allegations of collusion — Comey did not mention to the president-elect. No wonder Trump associated the dossier with the Moscow sex story.
York also mentioned that the media couldn’t believe that Trump obsessed over the supposed incident in Moscow. Now we know that is the only subject Comey briefed him on in the very first meeting. If Comey told him all about the dossier and Trump only concentrated on that hotel room incident then yes, he was obsessive. But Comey only spoke about the “golden showers.”
At the dinner, Comey wrote that Trump “thought very highly of” him, but “would understand if” he wanted to walk away. Comey said he enjoyed his job. Later on, Trump told Comey he was glad that Comey wanted to stay and heard great things about him. Trump also reiterated that he “wanted competence and independence and didn’t want the FBI involved in policy.”
Trump then said he wanted “honest loyalty” and Comey replied that he would “get that from me.” Comey even admitted in the memo that it’s quite “possible we understood that phrase differently, but I chose to understand it as consistent with what I had said throughout the conversation: I will serve the President with loyalty to the office, the country, and the truth.”
Again, it doesn’t sound like Trump wanted Comey to do as the president wanted or said. It sounds like he wanted the FBI to do what it’s meant to do.
Collusion, Obstruction
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC), and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) released a statement last night:
Former Director Comey’s memos show the President made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated. The memos also made clear the ‘cloud’ President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier.
The memos also show former Director Comey never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened. While former Director Comey went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts, he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation.
I couldn’t find anything in the memos that show Trump pushing for Comey to stop investigating former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. In fact, Comey wrote that Trump said that Flynn didn’t do anything wrong, but he had to let him go since “he misled the Vice President” and he “couldn’t have Flynn misleading the Vice President.” Flynn misled Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. Trump once again blasted all the leaks that have happened, including call outs with officials from Mexico and Australia.
Trump did tell Comey that he hoped the former director could “let this go” concerning Flynn, but in all honesty, it just sounds like Trump aired out how he wanted it to end. It didn’t sound like he pushed Comey to investigating Flynn just how he hoped it ended.
Comey
The memos also have a lot to say about Comey. Goodlatte, Gowdy, and Nunes point out that Comey held “at least two different standards in his interactions with others.” They wrote:
He chose not to memorialize conversations with President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, Secretary Clinton, Andrew McCabe or others, but he immediately began to memorialize conversations with President Trump. It is significant former Director Comey made no effort to memorialize conversations with former Attorney General Lynch despite concerns apparently significant enough to warrant his unprecedented appropriation of the charging decision away from her and the Department of Justice in July of 2016.
These memos also lay bare the notion that former Director Comey is not motivated by animus. He was willing to work for someone he deemed morally unsuited for office, capable of lying, requiring of personal loyalty, worthy of impeachment, and sharing the traits of a mob boss. Former Director Comey was willing to overlook all of the aforementioned characteristics in order to keep his job. In his eyes, the real crime was his own firing.
Comey stressed to Trump a few times that he “was not on anybody’s side politically and could not be counted on in that traditional political sense.” He also lashed out at leakers and called the leaks terrible. He told Trump that he doesn’t “do sneaky things” or leak or “weasel moves.”
We all know that isn’t true. We all know that Comey leaked one of these memos to a friend after Trump fired him in May 2017. That friend shared it with The New York Times, which led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate alleged Russian meddling.
Ex FBI Director James Comey s Memos by Anonymous qhCEBvau on Scribd
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Comments
Comey reminds me of Eddie Haskell, from “Leave it to Beaver”.
Or, maybe Newman from Seinfeld.
Trump reminds me of Ted Baxter from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”.
YGiC reminds me of Kim Jong Un: overweight, unattractive, and completely oblivious to the reality that people just think he’s a troll.
Ted always struck me more as a Biden, without the creepy child touching.
And you remind us of hillary klinton – when she’s falling down stairs.
Comey leaked four of the seven memos through an intermediary. Four of the memos were classified, so we’re told. Therefore, one of the memos that were leaked (or more) were classified.
Rosenstein then appointed a special counsel based on the leaked memos. He should have been fired that day. He was part of the game from the start.
You know, if I’m the new head of a large organization and the security chief takes me aside for a private meeting where he says, “We’ve got some reports of you peeing on a bed with Russian prostitutes.”
1) I’m going to view this as a possible shakedown, so I’m going to keep an eye on the chief.
2) I’m going to have him go investigate the accusations, because I know they’re false, and I also know they’re going to pop up later (because the press hates me), and I want to squish any stories that eventually run with the lies by being able to recite a list of truths that disprove them.
If the chief promptly comes back with a step-by-step rebuttal of the false accusations that I can use in the event they become news, I’ll relax a little.
If not, he’s not doing his job and needs replaced.
Same for if the chief keeps coming up with bogus charges against my other staff employees. Or I find he’s leaking confidential internal conversations to the press.
Especially the leaking of a confidential internal conversation (likely done by Clapper). When CNN reported that “the president was briefed” on the material, Comey is gone within the hour.
What reason would the president have had not to demand that the report, as portrayed to him by Comey, be delivered to him immediately for his review in the presence of WH counsel?
That face of Comey above is crying out for jail bars to be in front of it.
Comey has said, and Rosenstein’s actions confirm, that Comey used these memos, and their leaking, to force the appointment of Mueller as special counsel. Putting aside how the fix was in, in what way do the memo’s justify the appointment of special counsel? what specific statements in the memos justify the appointment of a special counsel and all the damage that Mueller and his investigation have done?
Comey looks even worse after these memos. He certainly thinks highly of himself. Being that these are memos supposedly to himself, is he channeling Stuart Smalley with his self aggrandizement?
The memos show that Trump was right with the various things he tweeted about, and Comey is just a slimy weasel who really is a mealy mouthed, small man who should never have held the position.
Being that these memos also supposedly helped launch the Mueller Inquisition, I’m left with how the heck did that happen? There isn’t anything in these that would warrant an investigation, other than maybe questioning what the heck is wrong with the author of these.
It was contemptible and utterly indefensible for greasy Comey to not inform POTUS when he first met with him that this “dossier” was nothing more than a piece of crone Clinton campaign-funded dirty tricks propaganda.
What possible reason could Comey have to keep this information from POTUS, except to keep him twisting in the wind under a cloud of alleged scandal?
If Comey had been honest in his dealings with POTUS, he might still have a job, and much contentiousness sown by incessant Dumb-o-crat scheming could have been avoided.
I think Comey had his heart set on Hillary, I am confident he didn’t vote for Trump, and could not stand the idea of him in office. I believe that colored everything in his interactions with Trump. It probably influenced him to pull a number like that, where he only talked about the salacious parts of the dossier, which Comey thought would get a rise out of Trump. It explains why Trump pretty much referred to the dossier mostly as pertaining to the sex in Russia bit.
If you look at everything Comey has said, with his wanting Hillary to be in the clear when she was elected, with his commentary (quite a few instances) in negative terms about Trump, you can see he is of the Never Trumper breed. He wanted Trump out of office.
“What possible reason could Comey have to keep this information from POTUS…”
Blackmail.
Blackmail whom, though? To what end?
Comey is disgraced not because he’s a blackmailer but because he threw law, precedent, and the FBI to winds to protect the Obama administration, the Lynch DOJ, and Hillary Clinton. The chilling point that guyjones makes is that Comey acted on partisan motivation to protect not the Office of the President but a particular, wished-for occupant of that Office. He wanted Hillary, he wanted a third Obama term, and he did everything in his power to ensure that she would not be an “illegitimate president.” Trump, though, Comey worked and continues to work over-time to delegitimatize.
Comey is a partisan hack, and as we’ve learned from exchanges between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, he actively worked to minimize the tarmac summit, to exonerate Hillary, and ultimately, to ensconce in our republic a dangerous, worrying revelation that the FBI cannot be trusted, that the FBI is motivated by politics, and that the FBI is incapable of carrying out its duties in upholding the rule of law. Comey decided that there was one set of laws for Obama, the Lynch DOJ, and Hillary and a completely different set of laws for everyone else, including but not exclusive of President Trump. Comey is amongst the most disgraceful, unethical, disloyal, disgusting, contemptible (former) civil servants going.
He may be out of the FBI, but his mini-mes are still there . . . just as biased, unethical, and contemptible as their former boss.
“Blackmail whom, though? To what end?”
I thought that self evident.
Whom? President Trump
To what end? Several. Keep Comey as FBI chief for starters.
Comey is a crook. He knows he’s a crook. Don’t be fooled. He knows what they tried to do.
Let me wrap my mind around this one. Comey tried to blackmail President Trump to keep his job? That’s what you think? What about the “Plan B” that his agents were on about? What about his apparent collusion with the Obama WH and DOJ to keep Hillary out of jail? If he just wanted to keep his job, all he had to do was switch loyalties once he saw the 2016 election outcome. He didn’t do that; instead, he did everything in his power to undermine the president.
Comey as a blackmailer is a joke. He hid in curtains in the Blue Room to avoid meeting with Trump; he suddenly started writing up his own personal musings about meeting with this (and only this) president. He was trying to set the groundwork for something, but it wasn’t blackmail.
He’s out of a job and is now making the rounds with his crazy book that has everyone on both sides of the aisle PO’d. This was probably not his plan. /just sayin’
I’m glad to see this. I thought I was reading different memos from the ones the media had.
How they got where they got to with this is amazing to me.
Do they not understand english? Or common usage? Seems they were looking for any thing they could distort to look bad for Trump. (surprise /s)
And this was the guy running the FBI?
I think the media, once they got these memos, had believed the actual memos would never see the light of day. When you can talk about memos existing, and reference them with the belief they will remain hidden from the public, you can say anything you want about what is in them. I don’t think Comey expected them to be released either, even though he leaked them through his friend who suddenly became his lawyer.
This is pretty much the same thing as the Democrat Shiff-for-brains memo that included classified information on purpose, in response to Nunes’ memo. It said close to the same thing, though it was tried to be spun as different. Shiff never believed they would release it. He was confident about that and was all over the media proclaiming it. Notice that Shiffy isn’t much heard of lately.
A president should expect loyalty from everyone in the executive branch, and especially from those who work directly with him. And they owe him that loyalty; if they can’t give it they should resign. Too many people in the government seem to think they don’t work for the president, they work for “the people”. Sorry, it ain’t so.
I realized last night that Comey speaks a lot about loyalty, but he never seems to speak about duty. Ever. He may refer to how something is going to look, or to considerations, or competing priorities, but the word “duty” seems mysteriously absent from his words.
So right! As in the military, our armed forces take an oath of loyalty to their corps, but their DUTY is to uphold our constitution and defend our republic as directed by their commander in chief.
Why should the standards between the people who take appointments to serve our country and our president be any different.
The oath for the uniformed service or for appointed officials is to the U.S. Constitution:
Now – where does the Priebus conversation with agents fit in to the timeline? The one where the feds tell him they aren’t investigating something, he asks them to confirm that to the press who is hounding him on it, they tell him they can’t comment on that, then the feds leak that Priebus is pressuring them about the investigation.
“No evidence of collusion or an attempt to obstruct the FBI from PDT.”
I’m amazed at how much and how often the MSM has trumpted this revelation. It 24/7 across all platforms!
Oh. Wait. That was a waking dream in another multiverse, all together.
Now back to regular programming: hate trump, hate trump, hate trum….
One of the most significant revelations of James Comey’s book is that there exists classified information, still unknown to this day, supporting the argument that Attorney General Loretta Lynch subverted the Hillary Clinton email investigation:
If the investigation continued on the same trajectory, the challenge was going to be closing the case in a way that maintained the confidence of the American people that their justice system was working in an honest, competent, and nonpolitical manner. We’d never convince the extreme Clinton haters in the news media of that, of course, but hopefully we could persuade a majority of fair- and open-minded Americans.
But in early 2016, there was a development that threatened to challenge that effort significantly. A development still unknown to the American public to this day. At that time, we were alerted to some materials that had come into the possession of the United States government. They came from a classified source — the source and content of that material remains classified as I write this. Had it become public, the unverified material would undoubtedly have been used by political opponents to cast serious doubt on the attorney general’s independence in connection with the Clinton investigation.
Why doesn’t Donald Trump declassify this information?
You’re making the assumption that Trump knows what Comey is referring to and has this information in hand. That is not necessarily correct.
Beyond that, if it’s not part of an investigation under color of law, you’re asking why Trump doesn’t use declassification to violate the privacy of an American citizen for the purpose of public embarrassment. I think that should be obvious.
You have a point, but from what was said about those things, it is supposed to be criminal, and given the lack of movement on it, would it be just the public embarrassment of a person, or exposing the criminality at least to show that despite the actions to thwart justice, at least the people know about the issue. If it’s classified to protect a person’s reputation and not for national security, does that seem right either?
There are a lot of things which are odious and wrong but which are not criminal. There are, in addition, things which should not be released by the government in spite of being unclassified. You’re starting from a premise Trump should abuse his power as chief executive to go over the head of the DoJ straight to the public. I view this as a bad premise.
If it’s criminal, then the DoJ should do something about it, but I think we both know the DoJ cares very little about what the President thinks about these matters.
DOJ IG now looking at Comey for leaking classified info in those memos
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-watchdog-probes-comey-memos-over-classified-information-1524243505?tesla=y
Comey whines that he is not a weasel.
And goes about proving it by acting exactly like a slimy little political weasel.
Comey claims he told Trump that he was ‘not on anybody’s side politically’, and then proceeded to ‘brief’ Trump on ludicrous allegations he KNEW were paid for by the Clinton, and further failed to reveal that he knew goddamn well EXACTLY who wrote and who paid for the dossier.
Conclusion: Comey is a slimy little weasel of a man mad that his blatant POLITICAL decisions have come back to bite him.
Feb 24, 2017
“Priebus went further. He claimed not just personal knowledge, but authority from the FBI to say that nothing in the Times story was true. On Meet the Press, he said of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation:
The report will say there’s nothing there. I know what [senators] were told by the FBI, because I’ve talked to the FBI. I know what they’re saying. I wouldn’t be on your show right now telling you that we’ve been assured that there’s nothing to the New York Times story if I actually wasn’t assured—and, by the way, if I didn’t actually have clearance to make this comment. I’m not a sloppy guy. On Fox News Sunday, Priebus added: “I have been approved to say this: that the top levels of the intelligence community have assured me that that story is not only inaccurate, but it’s grossly overstated and it was wrong. And there’s nothing to it.” Priebus refused to name his sources. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. But he hinted: “When I say top-level people, I mean top-level people, OK?””
The FBI person who told Priebus he could say that…. McCabe
This is unusual.
There are two sides to every story. Usually. But this is Comey’s side of it. And he still looks like a slimy weasel.
Slimy weasels are not unusual in Washington. But most of them know they’re slimy weasels, though of course they don’t admit it. But Comey seems to be so oblivious that he actually thinks he’s one of the good guys. And he fantasizes that a recitation of his double-crosses, schemes, obfuscations, and weasel moves demonstrates his great virtue. The guy is seriously weird-city.
How did such a delusional goof ever get promoted? His career wasn’t devoted to fooling the voters, it was spent among people who should have been close enough to their jobs to spot this loser a mile away. So why didn’t they, who are they, and who have they promoted lately? Inquiring taxpayers want to know!
Just as a point of historical interest, Heinrich Himmler—the most power-mad man in Nazi Germany—thought himself one of the good guys, too. (No, I’m not calling Comey a new Himmler—I’m reminiscing about historically noteworthy cases of self-deception in government.)
He thinks he serves a higher loyalty.
I agree with your questions as to how someone with Comey’s gaping shortfalls could advance to the top of the FBI food chain.
I have thought the same thing about Strzock, Page and McCabe.
They all stand in stark contrast to any FBI agents or U.S. Attorneys I have ever known, which is a good thing.
Flailing for relevancy.
“The two men discussed leaks and Comey wrote that Trump like other presidents ‘would discover the entire government leaks like crazy and explained that it often comes from the first or second hop out from those actually working on the sensitive thing.'”
Fills you with overwhelming confidence about the government protecting privacy and secrecy, eh?
So, what were the original reasons for the Trump-Russia investigation? Since the original reasons are now known to be bogus and/or fabricated, can someone explain the rationale for its continuation?