It gets funnier. The (literally) trumped up charge stems from Andrew McCabe correcting the Wall Street Journal that an active investigation into Hillary Clinton was ongoing and had not in fact been suspended - right before the election. You can't make this shit up. Zero to do with Trump's well-known subservience to Putin ('Russiagate'), and supported only by a misspoken statement from Ted Cruz of a recalled conversation with Comey about McCabe's (unauthorized) disclosure of information that was damaging to - get this - Clinton's election prospects. Did I mention that this (admittedly misquoted by Cruz) hearsay was used only because the statute of limitations had expired two years previous? Trump is now running the reprehensibly most corrupt DOJ in US history - into the ground. A must read.
The Testimony at the Heart of the Comey Indictment, Examined
nytimes.com
The charges against the former F.B.I. director center on an appearance he made before a Senate committee in September 2020. Here’s a closer look.
At the center of the Trump administration’s indictment of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, is testimony he delivered before Congress in September 2020. But the details of the accusation against him remain murky because the indictment is extremely sparse. It was filed by a novice prosecutor installed days ago by President Trump to lead the Eastern District of Virginia after her predecessor refused to bring the case.
Here is a closer look at the indictment that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, obtained from a grand jury, along with a proposed charge the jury rejected.
What are the charges against Mr. Comey?The indictment charges Mr. Comey with one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding.
The false statement charge asserts that in appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, 2020, Mr. Comey told a U.S. senator that he “had not ‘authorized someone else at the F.B.I. to be an anonymous source in news reports’ regarding an F.B.I. investigation concerning” an unnamed person. But in fact, the indictment says, Mr. Comey had authorized someone to do so.
The obstruction charge is even vaguer. It asserts that Mr. Comey made “false and misleading statements” before the committee, but offers no details.
What is the exchange at issue?
The quotation seemingly attributed to Mr. Comey in the first charge was actually uttered by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. That is one of several factors that makes dissecting their exchange complicated and ambiguous — an issue that could be problematic for proving to a jury that Mr. Comey not only made a false statement but also did so intentionally.
Mr. Cruz was in turn recounting an exchange at a Senate hearing on May 3, 2017. At the time, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, asked Mr. Comey whether he had “ever authorized someone else at the F.B.I. to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation.” Mr. Comey responded, “No.”
The 2017 exchange itself falls outside the five-year statute of limitations to charge someone with making a false statement, so Mr. Comey is being charged for saying in 2020 that he stood by having said “no” and that his testimony was “the same today.”
In context, Mr. Grassley was clearly referring to the investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia and to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of an email server.
In his questioning three years later, Mr. Cruz slightly mangled this exchange — he said Clinton “administration” rather than “investigation” — and he shifted to discuss a leak about a different Clinton-related investigation.
Confusingly, Mr. Cruz offered what appears to have been an inaccurate account of a disagreement between Mr. Comey and his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, regarding authorization to disclose that matter. He then asked Mr. Comey two different questions — whether Mr. Comey was saying he had never authorized anyone to leak, and whether if Mr. McCabe said otherwise, that meant Mr. McCabe was lying.
Mr. Comey again replied that he could speak only for himself and stood by his earlier testimony.
What was the McCabe matter about?In October 2016, The Wall Street Journal published an article that discussed internal disputes at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. over the investigation into the Clinton Foundation. While that investigation was publicly known at the time, the F.B.I. had not acknowledged its existence.
According to a 2018 inspector general report, a Journal reporter had called the F.B.I. and said he had heard that Mr. McCabe had shut down the inquiry because of the coming election. Mr. McCabe had an aide contact the reporter to tell him that the opposite was true. The aide recounted a phone call in August 2016 in which a Justice Department official had proposed freezing the inquiry until the election was over, and Mr. McCabe had insisted that it go forward.
Mr. McCabe had the authority to formally disclose the existence of the investigation. But the inspector general report accused him of not being candid about what happened. Among other things, Mr. McCabe told the inspector general that at a meeting after the article was published, he told Mr. Comey that he had authorized the disclosure and that Mr. Comey seemed accepting, but Mr. Comey’s recollection was that Mr. McCabe had led him to believe that he had nothing to do with it.
Mr. Trump viewed Mr. McCabe as an enemy. Days before he would have been eligible for a pension, the F.B.I. fired Mr. McCabe, accusing him of being misleading. The Trump Justice Department tried to prosecute him in 2020 for making a false statement to the inspector general, but it failed to obtain an indictment from a grand jury. Mr. McCabe in 2021 won a restoration of his pension and other benefits in a lawsuit.
</snip> Read the rest here: nytimes.com |
