Comey Inconsistent about Investigating Trump

[Elderberry]

The Post & Email On Sunday, December 9, 2018

In testimony provided to the House Judiciary and Oversight & Government Reform Committees on Friday, former FBI Director James Comey said both that President Donald Trump was and was not under investigation by the Bureau in regard to allegations of coordination between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian operatives.

A transcript of the six-hour session is here:  https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Comey-interview-transcript-12-7-18_Redacted-1.pdf

Comey refused to use the word “collusion,” as is commonly used in the press for the investigation now led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.  Comey claimed he had never encountered the term before in his lengthy law-enforcement career and did not know its meaning.

Early in the closed-door testimony, Comey stated that the FBI was investigating “four Americans” “to see if there was any connection between those four Americans and the Russian interference effort. And those four Americans did not include the candidate” (pp. 23-24).

More: https://www.thepostemail.com/2018/12/09/comey-inconsistent-about-investigating-trump/

[Elderberry]

On Sunday morning’s edition of “Fox & Friends,” former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy speculated that the “four Americans” Comey invoked are Carter Page, who is known to have been under FISA surveillance for a year; short-time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, now in federal prison on eight convictions unrelated to the campaign; Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and assistant to Manafort who accepted a plea deal as a result of the Mueller probe; and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor, who also accepted a plea deal.

On page 69 of the transcript, while responding to questions from Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) about Trump’s alleged attempts “to smear and undermine the credibility of his investigators at the Justice Department” (p. 67), Comey said, “To the extent it echoes the lies and the smears from the President, it simply increases the chances that the Department of Justice and the FBI’s credibility will be undermined.  I’m a big fan of oversight and truth-seeking, but when people veer from truth-seeking into trying to find any excuse to bad-mouth an organization that’s investigating the President, we’ve lost our way” (p. 69).

In sworn public testimony on June 8, 2017, Comey said that Trump was not under investigation.