Comey: Ousted to foil probe
sometimes seem under attack in America as much as the last election was.
Comey even maintained his composure during an odd exchange with Sen. John McCain, as he patiently kept explaining to McCain that the Hillary Clinton investigation had concluded when Comey spoke about it last summer, and the investigation of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s fired national security adviser, continues, with wind at its back.
“The investigation (of Flynn) was still going on when I was fired,” Comey said.
Through it all, they kept coming back to Russia, where Vladimir Putin continues to act as if the 2016 presidential election hacked itself. Through it all, Comey was the one who spoke passionately about the threat Russia poses not just to politicians, but to us all.
“The reason this is such a big deal,” Comey said, “is that we have a big, messy, wonderful country where we fight with each other all the time, but nobody tells us what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for except for other Americans. And that’s wonderful and often painful. But we’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion and lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal.”
Comey, a big man, was the big deal on this day. We’ve been waiting for somebody to speak for this country. Somebody finally did. THE FBI’s Russia investigation is no “hoax,” and it’s a “very big deal” that President Trump fired James Comey to hinder the FBI probe, the axed spy agency head charged during his much-hyped Senate panel testimony Thursday.
“There’s no doubt — it’s a fair judgment, it’s my judgment — that I was fired because of the Russia investigation,” Comey said. “I was fired in some way to change, or the endeavor was to change, the way the Russia investigation was being conducted.”
“That is a very big deal, and not just because it involves me,” he added. “The nature of the FBI, and the nature of its work, requires that it not be the subject of political consideration.”
Comey’s May 9 firing kicked off a series of logic-bending justifications from the White House, with Trump directly contradicting them days later to admit he’d dismissed Comey over “this Russia thing.”
Stunning news reports also indicated Trump had asked Comey to eighty-six a separate FBI investigation into briefly tenured national security adviser Michael Flynn — an alleged request Comey said left him “so stunned by the conversation that I just took it in.”
Also a big deal, according to Comey: Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.
“The reason this is such a big deal is we have this big, messy, wonderful country where we fight with each other all the time but nobody tells us what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for, except other Americans. And that’s wonderful and often painful,” Comey began an earnest monologue.
“But we’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion, lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal.”
U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Moscow meddled in the election in order to help Trump win, a fact that the Presi-