The Five Lines of Defense Against Comey—and Why They Failed

[LA se Karachi]

Trump’s supporters attacked the former FBI director’s testimony, but didn’t manage to discredit it

Brendan Smialowski / Getty / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

David Frum

Thursday was a bad, bad day for Team Trump. Things looked even worse at the end of the day than they did when the Senate Intelligence Committee adjourned midday.

The first line of defense—revealed by the president’s own team yesterday—is that Comey somehow vindicated Trump by confirming that he told Trump in January that Trump was not personally a target of an investigation. But if that assurance had been enough for the president, Trump would not have added the demand that Comey end the investigation of Michael Flynn. Trump evidently felt strongly motivated to protect Flynn—more strongly motivated than he had been to protect any of his other associates.

Line two of defense is that the president’s expression of a “hope” that Mike Flynn could be “let go” merely expressed a wish, not an order. But Adam Liptak, Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times, almost instantly produced an example of an obstruction of justice conviction that rested precisely on “I hope” language—and the all-seeing eye of Twitter quickly found more. Anyone who has ever seen a gangster movie has heard the joke, “Nice little dry cleaning store, I hope nothing happens to it.” The blunt fact is that after Comey declined to drop the investigation or publicly clear the president, Trump fired Comey. A hope enforced by dismissal is more than a wish.

A third line of defense is the attack on Comey personally: that he somehow discredited himself by not speaking out or resigning when he first felt the president had asked for something improper. I wonder how those in the Trump White House who have not yet spoken out or resigned felt about this argument. Comey stayed for the same reason that non-venal people throughout the Trump administration stay: in the hope of protecting not only the country, but also the president himself, from the worse people (or the no people at all!) with whom the president would likely replace them.

Paul Ryan tried a fourth line of defense during the hearings: that Trump had merely committed a protocol violation due to his inexperience in government. But if Trump were such an ingénue, why did he take such extraordinary care always to be alone with Comey when he made his improper demands?

The final line of defense was presented by Trump’s personal lawyer after the hearing ended: Comey was the villain of the story for leaking “privileged” conversations with the president. The premise here seems to be that executive privilege somehow forever silences a terminated federal employee. This is an extremely weird argument:

• Trump did not invoke executive privilege to prevent Comey from speaking to Congress, the usual place where executive privilege is asserted.
• Trump himself had spoken and tweeted about the conversation, which is usually taken to void executive privilege.
• Executive privilege has never before been thought to impose a lifetime obligation of silence upon former members of the executive branch.
• The Supreme Court case most directly on point, U.S. v. Nixon, established that executive privilege cannot be used to conceal evidence of crime, which is what Comey’s leak and subsequent sworn testimony, purportedly revealed.

Michael Isikioff of Yahoo News reported that four top D.C. lawyers had refused to handle Trump’s defense.

“The concerns were, ‘The guy won’t pay and he won’t listen,’” said one lawyer close to the White House who is familiar with some of the discussions between the firms and the administration, as well as deliberations within the firms themselves.

If accurate, Isikoff’s reporting suggests that a lifelong habit of skipping out on bills has saddled Trump with an attorney ill-prepared for the task ahead.

Friends of the president will reply that the Comey hearing did not produce a smoking gun. That’s true. But the floor is littered with cartridge casings, there’s a smell of gunpowder in the air, bullet holes in the wall, and a warm weapon on the table. Comey showed himself credible, convincing, and consistent. Against him are arrayed the confused excuses of the least credible president in modern American history.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...ense-against-comeyand-why-they-failed/529743/

 

[bhimram]

LMAO.
Here comes the liberal twist.

Admit it. Comey just destroyed Democrats and the Liberal Media.
Right now, from Comey's testimony all that comes out is that Trump has been unfairly hounded by Democrats in collusion with liberal media.

Democrats just smashed themselves in the testicles for 2020 elections.

 

[LA se Karachi]

Fact-checking President Trump’s attorney after Comey's testimony

By Jon Greenberg, Miriam Valverde on Friday, June 9th, 2017 at 2:06 p.m.

President Donald Trump's personal attorney Marc Kasowitz, said the president 'never, in form or substance' directed former FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating anyone, including former National Security adviser Michael Flynn. (June 8, 2017)


President Donald Trump says that fired FBI Director James Comey’s testimony on June 8 absolved him and exposed Comey as "a leaker."

"Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication...and WOW, Comey is a leaker!" Trump tweeted June 9.

After Comey’s under oath testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz disputed several of Comey’s statements. But there was a lot of spin in Kasowitz’s comments.

Here we’ll go over the televised June 8 statement from Trump’s attorney and sort out the facts.

"Although Mr. Comey testified that he only leaked the memos in response to a tweet, the public record reveals that the New York Times was quoting from those memos the day before the referenced tweet."

Comey’s written testimony said that after his first conversation Jan. 6 with then President-elect Trump he felt compelled to document their conversation in a memo. "Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations" with Trump became practice, Comey wrote.

During the Senate hearing, Comey said he asked a friend to share the content of a memo with a reporter after Trump tweeted on May 12 about "tapes."

Comey, who was fired May 9, said: "The president tweeted on Friday, after I got fired, that I better hope there's not tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, cause it didn't dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape.

"And my judgment was, I needed to get that out into the public square. And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn't do it myself, for a variety of reasons. But I asked him to, because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. And so I asked a close friend of mine to do it."

Comey at the hearing also said he shared with the FBI's senior leadership team communications he had with Trump.

Here’s the timeline of events:

May 9: Comey is fired.

May 11: The New York Times publishes a story about a January dinner Trump and Comey had, based on interviews with Comey’s associates. Comey had told the associates about the dinner.

May 12: Trump tweets, "James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"

May 15: Comey wakes up realizing the relevance of a potential tape, according to his testimony.

May 16: The New York Times publishes a story about the existence of Comey’s memos. The New York Times said it had not seen the memos, but included information from one of them about an Oval Office meeting in February, as explained and quoted by a Comey associate.

Kasowitz seemed to be referring to the New York Times story published May 11 — the day before Trump’s "tapes" tweet — narrating a January dinner between Trump and Comey. However, that story is not attributed to the memos, but to "two people who have heard his account of the dinner."

The New York Times reporter who authored both the May 11 and May 16 articles, Michael S. Schmidt, told PolitiFact, "the record on this speaks for itself."

Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter who contributed to the May 11 story, also tweeted that Kasowitz’s claim was wrong.

Overall, Kasowitz is wrong to suggest the public record shows that Comey leaked the memos before Trump’s tweet. Comey’s associates, however, spoke with the New York Times before Trump’s tweet. While the earlier story is based on their recollections of what Comey told them, much of the same information is contained in a memo Comey wrote.

"Mr. Comey admitted that he unilaterally and surreptitiously made unauthorized disclosures to the press of privileged communications with the president."

Kasowitz did not use the term executive privilege. That applies when Congress wants information from the White House and the administration resists. Legal experts say that case law on executive privilege is thin, but under those circumstances, the principle can shield the release of certain details. There are caveats.

There is no privilege if unlawful actions are discussed. And while Kasowitz might suggest that Comey broke a law, there is no legal penalty, particularly for anything Comey did after he was fired.

"The case for applying the privilege is strongest when the president is discussing the exercise of one of his or her powers with a member of the White House staff," said Edward Imwinkelried, an expert in evidentiary law at UC Davis. "However, you can make a strong case for extending the privilege to a conversation between the president and a high-ranking federal official outside the White House staff, so long as the topic of the conversation relates to a subject on which the president has power to act."

Imwinkelried said that Trump and Comey’s conversations enjoyed some expectation that they wouldn’t be shared without permission, and that Trump was the holder of the privilege. But the protection is not absolute and that Trump might have waived it with his own statements.

Lisa Griffin at Duke University School of Law said Trump put that protection at risk.

"Where the president has already described conversations he had with Director Comey in his tweets or other public statements, then with respect to what has been disclosed, there is no longer any privilege," Griffin said.

In his dismissal letter for Comey, Trump referred to being assured on three occasions that he was not the subject of an investigation. Griffin emphasized that it is unclear to what extent Trump waived privilege. All we can say is that it was less ironclad than it might have been without his public statements.

It’s worth noting that the consequences for Comey are more ethical than legal.

"Absent revelations of classified material or certain disclosures related to national defense or governmental financial interests, there is no crime that stems from discussing privileged communications," Griffin said.

"The leaks of this privileged information began no later than March 2017 when friends of Mr. Comey have stated he disclosed to them the conversations he had with the president during their Jan. 27, 2017 dinner and Feb. 14, 2017 White House meeting."

We didn’t see evidence that confirmed Kasowitz’s statement. Comey said he discussed his memos right after he wrote each one with colleagues at the FBI. Prior to being fired, the only other publicly reported conversation is a lunch he had with Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog.

In May, after Comey was fired, Wittes wrote an account of a March 27 conversation with Comey.

Wittes emphasized that "there was no leak from Comey, no leak from anyone else at the FBI, and no leak from anyone outside of the bureau either—just conversations between friends, the contents of which one friend is now disclosing."

According to Wittes, his conversation with Comey was short on specifics.

"Comey never told me the details of the dinner meeting; I don’t think I even knew that there had been a meeting over dinner until I learned it from the (New York)Times story," Wittes wrote. "But he did tell me in general terms that early on, Trump had ‘asked for loyalty’ and that Comey had promised him only honesty."

Clearly, Comey’s interactions with Trump and the White House shaped his conversations with Wittes. Less clear is whether speaking of those issues in general terms represents a breach.

"(Comey) also testified that immediately after he was terminated he authorized his friends to leak the contents of these memos to the press in order to ‘prompt the appointment of a special counsel.’ "

This is accurate. Comey did say he shared one memo, the one about his dinner with Trump. He said he thought of it after Trump tweeted that Comey better hope that there weren’t any tapes of their conversations. Comey said he hoped there were tapes so his account could be corroborated.

"My judgment was, I need to get that out into the public square," Comey said during the hearing. "I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel."

At another point in his testimony, Comey said he shared the memo about his conversation with Trump about Flynn with a friend. From his testimony, it is unclear if both events were in a single memo. Comey said the person he shared with was a professor at Columbia University. Law professor Daniel Richman told PolitiFact that he was that person.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...hecking-president-trumps-attorney-after-come/

 

[bhimram]

I again reiterate, Comey's statement in the senate is a death knell for Democrats.

1. It clearly showed Trump was never under investigation.
2. It clearly showed Trump never asked Comey to go slow on any investigation.
3. It clearly showed Obama administration asking Comey for favours in Clinton investigation.

I think what clearly frightened Comey into telling the truth is Trump stating all his conversations with Comey were recorded.