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Friday, April 20, 2018

The Comey memos

Read the memos yourself here.

The progression of this situation is almost funny ...

- 1) While director of the FBI, before Trump fired him, James Comey made detailed notes about his interactions with Trump to document them.

- 2) Those memos have become evidence in the ongoing FBI/Mueller investigation of Trump's obstruction of justice.

- 3) Trying to derail the investigation, Trump's Republican toadies in congress demanded from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that they be given those memos, something the FBI normally wouldn't do.

- 4) Eventually, the memos were released to Republican lawmakers who then conveniently leaked them to the public, believing this would destroy the usefulness of the memos. Instead this has allowed the public to see the worth of the information in Comey's memos.

The leaked Comey memos just blew up in Trump’s face

[...] First, the Comey memos. When you cut through all the noise, what they really reveal is a senior law enforcement official struggling to figure out in real time how to handle efforts by the president to turn him into a loyalist devoted to carrying out his political will in wildly inappropriate fashion. Comey’s memos recount in new detail that Trump repeatedly demanded his loyalty and that Trump pressed him to drop his probe into his then-national security adviser Michael Flynn.

We already knew those things happened via dogged reporting and Comey’s previous testimony to Congress. But now that we have the memos recounting them in full, contemporaneously, the consistency and credibility of this picture become a lot firmer. Simply put, the memos confirm that Trump did, in fact, try to exert a level of control over his FBI director, and over an ongoing investigation into his and his cronies’ conduct, that is wildly at odds with norms dictating that law enforcement should be free of political and/or presidential.

The Republican reaction, incredibly, has been to claim the memos vindicate Trump of any charge of obstruction of justice ....


Rachel Maddow interviewed James Comey last night on her show, just about at the time that the memos were being leaked by the Republicans and published. You can watch her interview with him online here: The Rachel Maddow Show. And here is where her show switches to Lawrence O'Donnell's following show and they discuss her interview with Comeu ...




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