THE NEWS SAYS
It is the nature of Comey to seek the truth. It is the nature of Trump to twist the truth to promote himself.
Jim Comey got an early read of, as he put it, “the nature of the man,” the man being Donald Trump, and thank goodness he did. Comey’s meticulous documentation of every interaction he had with Trump, prompted by his astute initial judgment that Trump “might lie,” has since shone a necessary spotlight on the President’s nefarious if not downright illegal behavior.
More credit to Comey: His prescient enlistment of a friend to leak the contents of some of those memos, spurred by Trump’s bizarre tweet about the possible existence of “tapes” of the two men’s conversations, smartly spurred creation of a special counsel to investigate Russian election interference, just as Comey intended.
Soon after putting him out to pasture, Trump smeared the former FBI director as a “showboat” and a “nut job,” but the man who appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday appeared anything but.
The hearing confirmed that this high-stakes competition of recollections is no ordinary game of he said-he said.
Comey is far from flawless, but it is the nature of the lifelong lawman to seek the truth, often obsessively. It is the nature of Trump, a lifelong showman, to twist the truth in order to promote and defend himself, often obsessively.
By outright denying, for instance, that he ever told Comey “I hope you can let this go” regarding the investigation into Michael Flynn’s contacts with the Russians. And by outright denying, too, that he ever told Comey, in a dinner meeting he had requested, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”
Unless the recordings Trump has threateningly hinted at are real, and it would be shocking if they were, consider Comey’s real-time notes the reliable record. Ignore the protective projections of an angry President and his lawyer.
Further proof of who’s believable: Back when he axed Comey, Trump tried to get away with it by blaming a contrived memo focused on Comey’s long-ago behavior in the Clinton email investigation, and then by claiming he had lost the support of his agents and that the bureau Comey led was in disarray.
“Those were lies, plain and simple,” Comey said Thursday.
Correct; Trump himself dropped the pretext just hours after trying to pass it off as fact, boasting to Kremlin officials who visited his White House that he rid himself of Comey in hopes the FBI would end its broader Russia investigation.
Last, we come to the question, central to any possible presidential obstruction of justice, of whether Trump’s expressed “hope” to Comey that he could let go a probe into Flynn’s potentially illegal contacts was merely a plaintive presidential musing or a directive.
Think back to the last time your boss said he or she hoped you could do something on the job. Ask whether it was meant to be taken as an order.
We thought so.