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Donald Trump’s Firing of James Comey

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VegasJerry

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May 10, 2017, 9:25:43 AM5/10/17
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Donald Trump’s Firing of James Comey

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD MAY 9, 2017

nytimes.com | May 9, 2017

The American people — not to mention the credibility of the world’s oldest democracy — require a thorough, impartial investigation into the extent of Russia’s meddling with the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump and, crucially, whether high-ranking members of Mr. Trump’s campaign colluded in that effort.

By firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey, late Tuesday afternoon, President Trump has cast grave doubt on the viability of any further investigation into what could be one of the biggest political scandals in the country’s history.

The explanation for this shocking move — that Mr. Comey’s bungling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server violated longstanding Justice Department policy and profoundly damaged public trust in the agency — is impossible to take at face value. Certainly Mr. Comey deserves all the criticism heaped upon him for his repeated missteps in that case, but just as certainly, that’s not the reason Mr. Trump fired him.

Mr. Trump had nothing but praise for Mr. Comey when, in the final days of the presidential campaign, he informed Congress that the bureau was reopening the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails. “He brought back his reputation,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “It took a lot of guts.”

Of course, if Mr. Trump truly believed, as he said in his letter of dismissal, that Mr. Comey had undermined “public trust and confidence” in the agency, he could just as well have fired him on his first day in office.

Mr. Comey was fired because he was leading an active investigation that could bring down a president. Though compromised by his own poor judgment, Mr. Comey’s agency has been pursuing ties between the Russian government and Mr. Trump and his associates, with potentially ruinous consequences for the administration.

With congressional Republicans continuing to resist any serious investigation, Mr. Comey’s inquiry was the only aggressive effort to get to the bottom of Russia’s ties to the Trump campaign. So far, the scandal has engulfed Paul Manafort, one of Mr. Trump’s campaign managers; Roger Stone, a longtime confidant; Carter Page, one of the campaign’s early foreign-policy advisers; Michael Flynn, who was forced out as national security adviser; and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself in March from the Russia inquiry after failing to disclose during his confirmation hearings that he had met twice during the campaign with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

We have said that Mr. Comey’s atrocious handling of the Clinton email investigation, which arguably tipped the election to Mr. Trump, proved that he could not be trusted to be neutral, and that the only credible course of action would be the appointment of a special prosecutor. Given all that has happened — the firing of the F.B.I. director, on top of Mr. Trump’s firing of the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, and his dismissal of nearly all United States attorneys — the need for such a prosecutor is plainer than ever. Because Mr. Sessions is recused, the decision to name a special prosecutor falls to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whose memo, along with a separate one by Mr. Sessions, provided Mr. Trump with the pretense to fire Mr. Comey.

This is a tense and uncertain time in the nation’s history. The president of the United States, who is no more above the law than any other citizen, has now decisively crippled the F.B.I.’s ability to carry out an investigation of him and his associates. There is no guarantee that Mr. Comey’s replacement, who will be chosen by Mr. Trump, will continue that investigation; in fact, there are already hints to the contrary.

The obvious historical parallel to Mr. Trump’s action was the so-called Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, when President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, prompting the principled resignations of the attorney general and his deputy. But now, there is no special prosecutor in place to determine whether the public trust has been violated, and whether the presidency was effectively stolen by a hostile foreign power. For that reason, the country has reached an even more perilous moment.



© 2017 The New York Times Company

VegasJerry

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May 10, 2017, 9:30:18 AM5/10/17
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Donald Trump Is Lying Again, Now About James Comey

David Leonhardt MAY 9, 2017

nytimes.com | May 9, 2017

The president of the United States is lying again.

He is lying about the reason he fired James Comey, the F.B.I. director. Trump claimed that he was doing so because Comey bungled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email, which meant that Comey was “not able to effectively lead the bureau.”

There is no reason to believe Trump’s version of the facts and many reasons to believe he is lying. How can I be so confident?

First, it’s important to remember just how often Trump lies. Virtually whenever he finds it more convenient to tell a falsehood than to tell a truth, he chooses the falsehood.

Second, Trump previously praised Comey for reopening the Clinton email investigation, which was the core of Trump’s rationale for the firing, as Igor Volsky noted.

Third, Trump claimed that he was merely following up on a Justice Department recommendation and released a letter from the department to bolster his case. Yet the timing doesn’t make sense — and Trump aides have already undercut their boss, by acknowledging that he wanted to fire Comey.

As Bill Kristol pointed out, the Justice Department letter was dated the same day as the firing, and the official who wrote it has been on the job for just two weeks — not enough time for a serious review that could have reversed Trump’s previous position.

“So there was no real recommendation from DOJ,” Kristol wrote. “Trump wanted to do it, and they created a paper trail.” Kristol, a conservative, added, “One can be at once a critic of Comey and alarmed by what Trump has done and how he has done it.”

Even more damning, White House sources also admitted on Tuesday night that Trump himself initiated the firing. The White House charged Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, with coming up with a reason to fire Comey, as The Times and others have reported.

Finally, and most obviously, Trump had a very big motive to fire Comey and install a loyalist. Comey was overseeing the investigation into the Trump campaign’s numerous strange ties with the Russian government.

“The firing of James Comey as F.B.I. director is a stunning event,” Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey, two of the sharpest observers of the Russia case, wrote for Lawfare. “It is a profoundly dangerous thing — a move that puts the Trump-Russia investigation in immediate jeopardy and removes from the investigative hierarchy the one senior official whom President Trump did not appoint and one who is known to stand up to power.”

The president is lying about firing a top law enforcement official, and he is almost certainly lying to protect himself and his aides from a full investigation into their own activities.

Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, wrote on Tuesday night, “We are in a full-fledged constitutional crisis.”

It’s now clear that Trump’s Justice Department has no independence. Both Sessions, and Sessions’s deputy, Rod Rosenstein, are acting like Trump enforcers. And now the F.B.I. is compromised as well.

The only way to unwind the constitutional crisis is an independent inquiry, completely free of Trump’s oversight. Several Republican members of Congress expressed concern about Comey’s firing, but words aren’t enough.

Members of Congress need to give Americans reason to believe the Russia investigation isn’t a charade with a predetermined outcome. They need to make clear that while the president may think he is above the truth, he is not above the law.

VegasJerry

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May 10, 2017, 9:37:04 AM5/10/17
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All the President’s Lies

David Leonhardt MARCH 20, 2017

nytimes.com | March 20, 2017

The ninth week of Donald Trump’s presidency began with the F.B.I. director calling him a liar.

The director, the very complicated James Comey, didn’t use the L-word in his congressional testimony Monday. Comey serves at the pleasure of the president, after all. But his meaning was clear as could be. Trump has repeatedly accused Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones, and Comey explained there is “no information that supports” the claim.

I’ve previously argued that not every untruth deserves to be branded with the L-word, because it implies intent and somebody can state an untruth without doing so knowingly. George W. Bush didn’t lie when he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and Obama didn’t lie when he said people who liked their current health insurance could keep it. They made careless statements that proved false (and they deserved much of the criticism they got).

But the current president of the United States lies. He lies in ways that no American politician ever has before. He has lied about — among many other things — Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women.

He tells so many untruths that it’s time to leave behind the textual parsing over which are unwitting and which are deliberate — as well as the condescending notion that most of Trump’s supporters enjoy his lies.

Trump sets out to deceive people. As he has put it, “I play to people’s fantasies.”

Caveat emptor: When Donald Trump says something happened, it should not change anyone’s estimation of whether the event actually happened. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. His claim doesn’t change the odds.

Which brings us to Russia.

Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign was an attack on the United States. It’s the kind of national-security matter that a president and members of Congress swear to treat with utmost seriousness when they take the oath of office. Yet now it has become the subject of an escalating series of lies by the president and the people who work for him.

As Comey was acknowledging on Monday that the F.B.I. was investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Trump was lying about it. From both his personal Twitter account and the White House account, he told untruths.

A few hours later, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, went before the cameras and lied about the closeness between Trump and various aides who have documented Russian ties. Do you remember Paul Manafort, the chairman of Trump’s campaign, who ran the crucial delegate-counting operation? Spicer said Manafort had a “very limited role” in said campaign.

The big question now is not what Trump and the White House are saying about the Russia story. They will evidently say anything. The questions are what really happened and who can uncover the truth.

The House of Representatives, unfortunately, will not be doing so. I was most saddened during Comey’s testimony not by the White House’s response, which I’ve come to expect, but by the Republican House members questioning him. They are members of a branch of government that the Constitution holds as equal to the presidency, but they acted like Trump staff members, decrying leaks about Russia’s attack rather than the attack itself. The Watergate equivalent is claiming that Deep Throat was worse than Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Nixon.

It fell to Adam Schiff, a Democratic representative from Southern California, to lay out the suspicious ties between Trump and Russia (while also hinting he couldn’t describe some classified details). Schiff did so in a calm, nine-minute monologue that’s worth watching. He walked through pro-Putin payments to Michael Flynn and through another Trump’s aide’s advance notice of John Podesta’s hacked email and through the mysterious struggle over the Republican Party platform on Ukraine.

“Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated, and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence? Yes, it is possible,” Schiff said. “But it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated, and that the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they have employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know, not yet, and we owe it to the country to find out.”

Comey, as much as liberals may loathe him for his 2016 bungling, seems to be one of the few public officials with the ability and willingness to pursue the truth. I dearly hope that Republican members of the Senate are patriotic enough to do so as well.

Our president is a liar, and we need to find out how serious his latest lies are.

popinjay

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May 10, 2017, 1:33:15 PM5/10/17
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On Wednesday, May 10, 2017 at 6:25:43 AM UTC-7, VegasJerry wrote:
> Donald Trump’s Firing of James Comey
>



First you libtards were mad at Comey, now you're defending him. You people are nuts.

risky biz

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May 10, 2017, 1:45:01 PM5/10/17
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Criticism of Comey here has been limited to his odd announcement about further investigating the laptop of that nut in New York to see if it related to the Hillary e-mail investigation which allowed the fake news operation to trumpet that the investigation had been 'reopened' just days before the election. There's plenty to criticize there about how the announcement was made and how it's significance was grossly inflated by the fake news world.

Bea Foroni

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May 10, 2017, 3:36:30 PM5/10/17
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Comey was Daffy Donald's BFF until he wasn't.

If Daffy would have fired him on January 21st, it would have been a good thing. It the middle of a Daffy investigation, not a good thing.

Daffy Donald fired him in an insensitive (cruel) manner, without seeking council. Not the behavior desired from the man with his finger on the nuclear button.

Sad.

Dutch

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May 10, 2017, 4:04:31 PM5/10/17
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That's the whole point. Democrats had a reason to be angry at Comey,
Trump didn't. Trump praised Comey profusely, until last week... Comey
asks the Whitehouse for more resources to investigate Russian
interference in the election, then BOOM! CHOP!!

Co-inky-dink? Methinks not. This is all playing out as I predicted,
Watergate 2.0, except way worse because.. TREASON.

VegasJerry

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May 10, 2017, 4:44:45 PM5/10/17
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On Wednesday, May 10, 2017 at 10:33:15 AM UTC-7, popinjay wrote:
Second, you're making up phony positions for us... again.

FL Turbo

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May 22, 2017, 11:05:34 AM5/22/17
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You got that right.
The Demos did what was described as a "bootleggers turn" and shifted
immediately from hating Comey to loving him as soon as he was fired.

Poor ole Colbert got whiplashed.
He had gotten the changed narrative from the Demos but his audience
had not.
His announcement of Comey's firing got wild applause from the
audience, not at all what he expected.
He only had a lame comeback saying that there must be a lot of Trump
supporters in the audience.

Now that's FUNNY.
As if Trump supporters would be in his audience.

It is to laugh.
HaHa

But yeah, the Libtards are even more deranged than they were under
Bush. And that's going some.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their
level and beat you with experience.”
-- George Carlin

VegasJerry

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May 22, 2017, 4:07:51 PM5/22/17
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On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 8:05:34 AM UTC-7, FL Turbo wrote:
> On Wed, 10 May 2017 10:33:06 -0700 (PDT), popinjay
> <paulpo...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> >On Wednesday, May 10, 2017 at 6:25:43 AM UTC-7, VegasJerry wrote:
> >> Donald Trump’s Firing of James Comey
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >First you libtards were mad at Comey, now you're defending him. You people are nuts.
> You got that right.
> The Demos did what was described as a "bootleggers turn" and shifted
> immediately from hating Comey to loving him as soon as he was fired.

Then you should have no trouble proving your (Fox's) phony accusation.

Try puking up that cool aid...

Jerry

risky biz

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May 22, 2017, 7:55:34 PM5/22/17
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On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 8:05:34 AM UTC-7, FL Turbo wrote:
Let's see if I can follow your reasoning here. If I think that something person A does is wrong or deserving of criticism then I can't logically think that something Person B does to Person B is wrong. That's pretty much what you're saying. And it's pretty stupid.

This is what George Carlin had to say about your reasoning ability:

risky biz

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May 22, 2017, 7:58:06 PM5/22/17
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> Let's see if I can follow your reasoning here. If I think that something person A does is wrong or deserving of criticism then I can't logically think that something Person B does to Person B* is wrong. That's pretty much what you're saying. And it's pretty stupid.
>
> This is what George Carlin had to say about your reasoning ability:
> “Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

*[Person B does to Person A]
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