Congressional Committee chairs Devin Nunes (R-CA), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), and Trey Gowdy (R-SC) savaged former FBI director James Comey, after his memos about meetings with Trump were handed over to Congress on Thursday.
The memos, which Comey had been hanging on to since he was fired by Trump in 2017, make no case for collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and show no evidence that Trump tried to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into the alleged collusion.
Trump’s alleged obstruction was used by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as a basis to launch the Mueller investigation, which is ongoing, despite so far failing to implicate Trump in any way.
Nunes, Goodlatte and Gowdy hit back on Thursday, arguing that the memos show Comey’s investigation up as flimsy and politically motivated.
“Former Director Comey's memos show the President made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated,” they wrote. “The memos also made clear the ‘cloud’ President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier.”
The dossier in question was compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele on behalf of research firm Fusion GPS, and funded by Trump’s opponents in the Democratic party. Among other things, it alleges that, while on a trip to Moscow in 2013, Trump hired two prostitutes to urinate on each other in a hotel room that Barack Obama had previously stayed in.
In a recent interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Comey hinted that he might believe the unproven allegations.
“I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,” he told Stephanopoulos. “It’s possible but I don’t know.”
In the memos, Comey never once wrote that he felt obstructed. “While former Director Comey went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts,” the committee members wrote, “he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation.”
The committee members then ripped into Comey for his double standards. “He chose not to memorialize conversations with President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, Secretary Clinton, Andrew McCabe or others, but he immediately began to memorialize conversations with President Trump.”
The double standards extend to Comey’s private and public opinions of the President. In his recent book, Comey declared Trump morally unfit for office, and likened him to a vengeful mafia boss. In private, this description apparently didn’t faze the [now former] FBI director.
“He was willing to work for someone he deemed morally unsuited for office, capable of lying, requiring of personal loyalty, worthy of impeachment, and sharing the traits of a mob boss. Former Director Comey was willing to overlook all of the aforementioned characteristics in order to keep his job. In his eyes, the real crime was his own firing,” the statement continued.
Nunes, Goodlatte and Gowdy ended their statement by savaging Comey’s judgement of his Deputy, Andrew McCabe. McCabe, according to reports referred to the US attorney’s office yesterday, lied under oath about leaking classified FBI information to the press.
The memos, they concluded, should not serve as evidence against Trump if he was charged with obstruction, but “would be Defense Exhibit A should such a charge be made."
The release of Comey’s memos excited Trump, who took to Twitter to declare “James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?”
Trump has been locked in a war of words with the former FBI director in recent weeks. Last week he called Comey “a weak and untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible director of the FBI.”