by WorldTribune Staff, April 13, 2018
Former FBI Director James Comey has admitted he did not tell President Donald Trump what he knew: That the unverified “dossier” by ex-British spy Christopher Steele was paid for by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
In an interview with ABC News to promote his book “A Higher Loyalty”, Comey said that, during a meeting with the then-president-elect on Jan. 6, 2017 at Trump Tower, he informed Trump of the dossier’s unproven charge that in 2013 Trump had met with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel.
In the interview with ABC’s George Stephanopolous, Comey defended his decision to keep Trump in the dark on the dossier’s funding “because it wasn’t necessary for my goal.”
The interview will air April 15 on “20-20.”
“Trump supporters say that if Comey had been forthcoming on Jan. 6 the White House from the start would have been in a better position to defend itself against dossier allegations of Russian collusion,” Rowan Scarborough noted in an April 13 report for The Washington Times. “To this day, they remain unconfirmed publicly.”
Comey also did not inform Trump that the dossier had been used by the FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.
A Congressional source involved in the Russia investigations told the Washington Times: “The fact that Comey withheld from Trump the fact that the Steele dossier was opposition research funded by the DNC and the Hillary campaign is stunning, and Comey’s excuse for not telling him is ludicrous. As everyone now knows, the FBI and DOJ also hid this information from the FISA court. This is a pattern of deception at the highest levels of our government, and it’s absolutely indefensible.”
In the ABC interview, Comey told Stephanopoulos: “I started to tell him about the allegation was that he had been involved with prostitutes in a hotel in Moscow in 2013 during the visit for the Miss Universe pageant and that the Russians had filmed the episode, and he interrupted very defensively and started talking about it, you know, ‘Do I look like a guy who needs hookers?’ ”
That charge had come directly from the dossier.
“And I assumed he was asking that rhetorically, I didn’t answer that, and I just moved on and explained, ‘Sir, I’m not saying that we credit this, I’m not saying we believe it. We just thought it very important that you know.’ ”
Comey continued: “I said … ‘I’m not saying that I believe the allegations, I’m not saying that I credit it,’ I never said, ‘I don’t believe it,’ because I couldn’t say one way or another. I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible, but I don’t know.”
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