Ugliness escalates as story unfolds
WASHINGTON Just to be clear, this hasn’t happened before: The former FBI director publicly called the president a liar, and he returned the favor.
Ousted FBI director James Comey’s blockbuster testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee didn’t settle whether Trump associates colluded with Moscow’s alleged meddling in last year’s presidential campaign, or resolve whether President Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice.
But in two days of allegations that the president’s private lawyer flatly denied, Comey painted a devastating portrait of a president who he said lied in public and bulldozed in private through the governmental norms designed to protect the rule of law.
His accounts, which Comey said are backed up by contemporaneous memos, are guaranteed to fuel the multiple investigations that cast a cloud over the White House, carrying consequences impossible to predict. Whatever happens next, the back-and-forth accusations of suspicion, dishonesty and wrongdoing between the president of the United States and the man who served as one of his most senior law enforcement officials riveted the political world.
“I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting, so I thought it was really important to document,” Comey said when asked why he wrote accounts of his encounters with Trump as soon as they were over, something he hadn’t done after meetings with George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
After Trump fired him last month, Comey said, the president offered shifting explana-
deeper investigation of whether Trump broke the law.
“We now have a series of events that, at least based on what we know now, strongly suggests a desire to influence the investigation of Flynn,” said Dan Petalas, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section.
The president’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz said Thursday that Trump “never sought to impede” the FBI’s investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump said he did not ask Comey to end the FBI’s investigation of Flynn.
Comey gave a markedly different account in his testimony and in prepared remarks released Wednesday. He began Thursday by accusing the president of lying about the basis for his firing, then spent more than two hours detailing their private interactions. Former prosecutors said his testimony shed light on some of the harder-to-prove facets of an obstruction case, in particular whether Trump would have any reason to think that asking the FBI to drop its investigation of Flynn was improper.
Of greatest significance, former prosecutors said, was Comey’s testimony that the president requested that his aides and Sessions leave the Oval Office before he spoke to Comey about Flynn.
“The inference one would draw is that Trump knew what he was about to say was inappropriate,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor who served under Comey. “It shows he knew that it would not be a good thing for him to say in front of a room full of people.”
Comey said he was struck by the circumstances. “A significant fact to me is so why did he kick everybody out of the Oval Office?” he said. “Why would you kick the attorney general, the president, the chief of staff out to talk to me if it was about something else? So that, to me, as an investigator, is a significant fact.”
O’Sullivan and other lawyers said it doesn’t matter whether Trump, as the government’s chief executive, had the legal authority to instruct Comey to drop an investigation or to fire him. Otherwise-legal conduct can form the basis of an obstruction charge if it’s done for an improper purpose.
“Obstruction is what gets them every time,” O’Sullivan said. “That’s one lesson that everybody in Washington pretty much knows.”