by WorldTribune Staff, June 9, 2017
Former FBI Director James Comey “did himself no favors” with his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, said a consultant who attended meetings at the White House yesterday during the heavily-publicized hearings.
The same could be said of Comey’s riveting admission about a New York Times article upon which the entire “Trump-Russia collusion” controversy hinged.
While testifying about the pressures he felt coming from the new president and unspecified concerns about Russian interference with the campaign, Comey acknowledged that he leaked “privileged” conversations he had in the Oval Office after he was fired in order to “prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”
“Today, Mr. Comey admitted that he leaked to friends his purported memos of these privileged conversations, one of which he testified was classified,” Marc Kasowitz, the president’s personal lawyer, said.
The watchdog group Judicial Watch issued a statement on June 9 that termed Comey’s actions “lawless”. The memos he leaked are “the property of the United States Government” and should now be seized by the Justice Department, Judicial Watch Director of Investigations Chris Farrell said in an interview with Lou Dobbs.
“Although Mr. Comey testified he only leaked the memos in response to a tweet, the public record reveals that the New York Times was quoting from these memos the day before the referenced tweet, which belies Mr. Comey’s excuse for this unauthorized disclosure of privileged information and appears to be entirely retaliatory,” Kasowitz said.
Meanwhile, a New York Times story that was one of the driving forces behind the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was debunked by the ex-FBI chief on June 8.
The Times report on Feb. 14 said: “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.”
The Times story “took on enormous importance since the political Left, and Democrats, relied on it to spin the Russian collusion story in Congress, cable TV and the Internet,” Rowan Scarborough wrote for The Washington Times on June 8.
Comey was asked by Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, whether the Times story was “almost entirely wrong.” Comey answered, “Yes.”
In response to a similar question by Sen. James Risch, Idaho Republican, Comey said that “in the main, it was not true.”
“The challenge, and I’m not picking on reporters about writing stories about classified information, is that people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on and those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it,” Comey said.
Comey added that “many many stories” on the FBI’s Russia investigation “are just dead wrong.”
Scarborough noted that conservatives “have said they think the Times story, and other questionable narratives, are fed by Obama administration officials and holdovers in the federal government who are trying to sabotage Trump.”
Kasowitz also took aim at the media.
“Contrary to numerous false press accounts leading up to today’s hearing, Mr. Comey has now finally confirmed publicly what he repeatedly told the President privately: The president was not under investigation as part of any probe into Russian interference. He also admitted that there is no evidence that a single vote changed as a result of any Russian interference.”
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