James Comey's almost three hours of testimony Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee yielded plenty of new revelations and eyebrow-raising findings. He said Comey's own account of Trump's comments about Flynn showed they were "far from a directive", and he faulted the former director for funneling information to the press. Comey said that, after his firing last month, the White House told "lies, plain and simple" about him and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Comey learned of his abrupt dismissal while giving a speech, and said he was sorry he didn't get a chance to say farewell to his former colleagues. "Lordy, I hope there are tapes".
"I took it as a direction", Comey said. "It's my judgment that I was sacked because of the Russian Federation investigation", Comey testified.
"I don't think it's for me to say whether the conversation I had with the President was an effort to obstruct", Mr Comey said.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., called a recently fired FBI director's allegation that President Donald Trump asked him to drop an investigation into his former national security adviser "extremely troubling". So too are the efforts of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has succeeded in bringing some facts to the public. "The fundamentals might be there, potentially, but there is more investigation in the future". Like how Trump invited Comey for a disconcerting one-on-one dinner date, sat him at a tiny oval table in the center of the White House Green Room, and kept saying things to Comey like, "I need loyalty", "I expect loyalty", and "That's what I want, honest loyalty"-all of which were followed by long, "awkward" and seemingly sinister pauses ... pauses that might send a chill down a weaker man's spine".
"Why did he kick everybody out of the Oval Office?"
"It's critical for Americans to understand this key, future-oriented reality: Putin wants the American people to see these Russian Federation related issues through reflexively partisan, American-versus-American lenses and blind ourselves to the fact that Moscow is now plotting to undermine our democratic institutions, without regard to Republicans or Democrats", Sasse said in the statement.
Comey also pointed out that they were right - Sessions recused himself from the Russian Federation investigation less than two weeks later.
Good Lord, release the tapes! Comey also refused to characterize anything the president had done as being against the law.
Greece's ex-PM injured in letter bomb attack, police say
More than a dozen people have been convicted of group membership and jailed. "Terrorists are enemies of democracy", he said. Papademos was appointed caretaker prime minister in November 2011 following concerns the country would exit the Eurozone.
I hope so, too, but I would be surprised if such recordings exist. And indeed it did. In fact, Trump favored dropping the criminal investigation, Comey added.
As NPR's Scott Horsley reports, the lawyer also accused Comey of misstating the timing of the leak.
Comey: Not a question I can answer in open setting, Mr. Chairman. Nothing like that appears in Comey's statement, and nothing can be reasonably interpreted that way.
Comey's memos about his meetings with Trump are now in Mueller's hands. The Times ran a story about the memo contents later that day. New York Times reporters corroborated Comey's timeline on Thursday after Kasowitz's statement. Comey tried to explain that the investigation of Clinton's emails was finished whereas the investigation of Trump's campaign is ongoing. His rationale was that his role as a high-profile surrogate and advisor for the Trump campaign made it inappropriate for him to be involved in an investigation of that same campaign, a rationale which received little pushback, except reportedly from the president himself. Comey told both Sens. John McCain's line of questioning, and judging by social media, he wasn't alone.
But his point wasn't at all clear, as the senator himself later acknowledged.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Comey how Sessions could be involved in his firing over the Russian Federation investigation when Sessions had recused himself from any involvement in that case in March.
Should the president's actions be perceived as an obstruction of justice, this could lay the ground for impeachment proceedings, though Mr Comey stopped short of stating that the president had obstructed justice, saying it was a matter for special counsel Robert Mueller.
It's not often that congressional hearings hark back to medieval times, but then again this was not a normal hearing.
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