“It might have been a mistake.”
That was former FBI Director James Comey appearing on ABC News with George Stephanopoulos that aired April 15, admitting that on Jan. 6, 2017 when he assured then President-Elect Donald Trump that he was not under FBI investigation for Russia collusion, it was very misleading.
Comey had just presented Trump with the Hillary Clinton, DNC-paid for Fusion GPS-Christopher Steele dossier alleging that the President was a Russian agent who had been compromised. He says he assured Trump, “We’re not investigating you, sir.”
Yet Comey explained, “The general counsel of the F.B.I. had argued, ‘Look, it’s literally true that we don’t have a case open on President-elect Trump. We’re looking at other people.’ And– and– but his argument was, ‘There’s a problem with you saying that for two reasons. First, inevitably as we move along in the investigation as– as to whether anyone was working with the Russians, the campaign’s going to have to be a focus and the candidate’s always the head of the campaign, so inevitably we’re going to have to look at him. And second, you’re going to create a duty to correct. But if you tell him he’s under investigation and that changes, don’t you have to go back and tell him…’”
Here, Comey is quoting the FBI’s former general counsel, James Baker, as stating that “inevitably we’re going to have to look at him,” speaking of the President.
This is a stunning admission.
Here, Comey is revealing that before the President had even been sworn in, a major investigation of Trump was already in the works. What he told Trump was factually misleading. It was a lie.
Most of all, because, by then, in Jan. 2017, the Trump campaign was already under investigation. It wasn’t merely hypothetical. They weren’t thinking about looking into the Trump campaign. They already were. We know that because the Steele dossier had already been used as evidence to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrant against the Trump campaign in Oct. 2016. The surveillance was ongoing.
It is unbelievable that Comey would have been unaware of it. Per the House Select Committee on Intelligence Feb. 2018 memorandum on those FISA court applications, “Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI.”
Per Comey’s testimony, again affirmed in the ABC News interview, the Steele dossier that made these allegations was “salacious and unverified.” Yet, he used it before the FISA court judge and never told the court that it was potentially false, that he doubted it and that it had been paid for by the Democrats.
And still, to this day, Comey is pretending to the American people that the investigation into Trump and his campaign had not yet occurred when Trump was coming into office. When, by the FBI general counsel’s own definition — who per Comey had advised him — any investigation into the Trump campaign was an investigation into Trump. Of course they were already looking at Trump. Just look at the timeline. Just look at his statements.
By the time Comey spoke to Trump, the investigation into him and his campaign had been going on for months. And Comey knew it.
On Feb. 14, 2017, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department was in fact investigating Trump and campaign officials for supposed contacts with Russian intelligence officials. But Comey would later testify that that story was false, still maintaining there had been no investigation into Trump at that stage.
Former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, after being informed the story was false by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe asked him to come forward and disavow the story. Soon thereafter, stories began circulating of the White House “obstructing” justice. McCabe and Comey certainly should have known which way the investigation was headed, and now we know per Comey quoting Baker, they knew all along that the President would be in the crosshairs, because they had discussed it.
That is, how to approach Trump, the subject of the FBI’s ongoing investigation into Russian alleged interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s alleged hand in coordinating with the Russian government to put DNC-hacked emails onto Wikileaks, as the Steele dossier alleged.
Maybe he was in denial. But Comey lied to the then-President Elect about the investigation and then again after Trump was sworn in. Comey has repeatedly attempted to downplay the FBI’s investigation that began in 2016, but by then the Justice Department was already all in.
That alone should have been grounds for his firing, which now we know was wholly justified and that, constitutionally and legally, the President had absolute authority to execute. Here was the FBI usurping the President’s powers to execute the laws by lying to him about an active investigation by the nations’ lead law enforcement agency.
Who did Comey think he was talking to?
Here, he was acting as if Trump would have no role in enforcing the laws in just a matter of days. Like the President, or maybe just this President, is some passive observer in the executive branch. Trump was confronting a faction within the executive branch that believes it has a monopoly on justice. On the truth.
And it continues to this day. Considering the lengths that the Justice Department has gone through to conceal its investigation and to this day is still hiding documents and information from Congress, lying to the President, and so forth after it spied on the opposition party in an election year, it’s a wonder everybody in the entire building hasn’t been fired.
This is the greatest scandal in the FBI’s history, and it happened under James Comey’s watch. Perhaps that is the truth he fears the most. For shame.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
