Comey accuses Trump of lying
Analysis: Will former lawman chip at core presidential support?
“I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting, so I thought it important to document.” Former FBI Director James Comey on why he wrote memos to record his conversations with President Trump
Political opponents and fact-checkers were calling out Donald Trump for his mendacity long before he was president. But hearing fired FBI Director James Comey label Trump a liar Thursday at a Senate hearing into Russian meddling in the 2016 election could damage the president’s credibility with an audience that so far has been unshakeable: his core supporters.
“It will continue to weaken his support among those who strongly approve of him, if for no other reason than the controversy
around him continues and he’s not doing the things he said he was going to do,” said G. Terry Madonna, who directs the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College in the swing state of Pennsylvania and runs the school’s poll.
Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “those were lies, plain and simple,” when the White House said he was fired because he was doing a poor job leading the FBI. He also told senators he began rigorously documenting his conversations with Trump because, “I was honestly concerned that he would lie about the nature of our meetings.”
Social media buzzed with Comey’s response when senators brought up Trump’s tweeted hint that their conversations were secretly recorded: “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday that she didn’t know if tapes exist, and then uttered a Nixon-era response that no presidential spokeswoman wants to be forced to give: “I can definitively say the president is not a liar.” She added that “it’s frankly insulting the question would be asked.”
It didn’t seem that insulting to Trump’s fellow Republicans on the panel Thursday. None pushed back at Comey for calling out the president’s alleged lies.
Some political analysts said Comey’s words were likely to carry more weight than even a nonpartisan fact-checking operation such as PolitiFact. The Pulitzer Prize-winning site has found that 71 percent of the Trump statements it has examined have been “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire.”
But hearing the former head of the FBI say it during an internationally watched hearing codifies that image of Trump into the public’s mind — and some of that may leach into the minds of his most devout supporters.
“It’s not a member of the mainstream media (saying it). It’s not another politician. It’s the (former) head of the FBI,” said John Trasviña, who was general counsel for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution in the 1990s and now is dean of the University of San Francisco Law School.
“It’s harder to dismiss law enforcement,” Trasviña said. “There are people in other parts of the country who are totally inclined to believe law enforcement — they are still respected institutions.”
And that’s even considering Comey’s checkered reputation among partisans — particularly some Democrats who thought he bungled announcements, just days before the November election, around the investigation involving Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
“Comey’s no angel, he’s not perfect,” Trasviña said. “But if you have two people in the room — him and Trump — people will choose Comey.”
While Comey’s testimony “didn’t really produce a bombshell,” said Madonna, the Pennsylvania pollster, it could erode his credibility with his core supporters in that swing state. Even though he narrowly won the state, by 44,292 votes out of 6 million cast, Trump took 56 of 67 Pennsylvania counties. In 23 of those, many in the state’s historic coal regions, Trump won at least 70 percent of the vote.
For most voters, the effect of Comey’s testimony isn’t just what he said, but how it could lead to further paralysis of Trump’s legislative agenda.
A Franklin and Marshall survey of registered Pennsylvania voters last month found that 37 percent — and only 18 percent of independent voters — approved of the job Trump was doing as president. Yet 67 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s job so far.
What was said in a Senate hearing isn’t going to eliminate that hard-core support, but it may continue to chip away at it.
“You have to remind yourself that the everyday voter is not doing what we’re doing — sitting down and spending an entire morning watching a Senate hearing,” Madonna said.
Still, Saulo Londoño, Republican Party chairman in Butte County, conceded that “it’s never a good thing when an FBI director — former or current — calls the president a liar. I’m not going to defend that.”
But Londoño predicted that Trump’s GOP base will be buoyed, since Thursday’s hearing didn’t uncover a smoking gun linking the president to obstruction of justice. Many Trump supporters will focus on how Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, pressed Comey to explain why he didn’t ask Trump what he meant by “I hope” when Trump said he hoped Comey would drop the collusion investigation involving fired national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Londoño liked when Risch asked Comey: “Do you know of any case where a person has been charged for obstruction of justice, or for that matter any other criminal offense, where they said or thought they hoped for an outcome?”
Londoño said, “That establishes in the mind of Republicans that there isn’t anything there in the obstruction of justice charge.”
And while the specter of the White House being forced to say that the president isn’t a liar may have echoed former President Richard Nixon’s statement, “I am not a crook,” during the Watergate scandal four decades ago, “it’s a long way from Watergate,” said Evan Thomas, a longtime journalist and author of the best-selling “Being Nixon: A Man Divided.”
“It all feels Watergatey — with the high-profile hearing — but that doesn’t mean it is,” Thomas said. “Trump is a liar. But being a compulsive liar is a long way from obstruction of justice. They still have to build a case for that.”