by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : Former FBI Director James Comey has released memos documenting his conversations with Donald Trump that includes the US President’s concerns about media leaks, investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Trump’s recollection of his Russian counterpart telling him that Russia had the “most beautiful hookers in the world”.
The Comey memos sent to Congress from the Justice Department on Thursday night included documentation of seven conversations he had with Trump from January 7, 2017 to April 11, 2017. Four of the notes were classified and partially redacted and three of them were unclassified, the Washington Post reported.
Details published in the notes were consistent with allegations in Comey’s new book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership”.
The memos reveal the extent of Trump’s preoccupation with unproven allegations that he had consorted with prostitutes while in Moscow in 2013. Trump, according to the memos, repeatedly denied the allegations and persuaded Comey to help disprove them, while also recalling being told by Putin that Russia has the “most beautiful prostitutes”.
Comey also wrote that the President said on January 27 he had “serious reservations” about Flynn. “The guy has serious judgment issues,” the former FBI head was told. Flynn was forced to resign over charges that he had lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. He is now cooperating with the probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Comey wrote that he was asked by Trump to drop an inquiry into links between Flynn and Russia. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump was reported to have said after a White House meeting.
Trump seized on the memos in a Twitter message and said: “James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?”
Comey’s memo of his February 14, 2017, discussion with Trump included a previously unreported exchange about trying to prevent leaks. At the time, he was upset that transcripts of his phone conversations with the Mexican and Australian leaders had appeared in The Washington Post.
Trump was also focussed on loyalty, as Comey said in Congressional testimony and his book. In their final April 11 conversation, Comey wrote that Trump told him: “I have been very loyal to you, very loyal, we had that thing, you know.”
Comey said that he assumed Trump was referring to his previous pledge for loyalty before his inauguration, where Comey responded he would provide “honesty”, and Trump responded, “honest loyalty”.
The former FBI chief was fired in May.
Trump’s complaint about the “cloud” hanging over him due to the Russia investigation was also included in the memos. In the same conversation, Trump also suggested he would sue Christopher Steele, the British ex-intelligence officer who wrote the dossier, although he never did so.
The unredacted, classified version of the memos will be made available to Congress, the Department of Justice said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership; Author: James Comey; Publisher: Pan Macmillan; Pages: 305; Price: Rs 799
As an Assistant US Attorney in New York in the early 1990s, James Comey was part of the anti-mafia campaign and became well versed about how its top bosses perceived themselves, the people who worked for them and the world. As FBI chief a quarter of century later, he saw the same worldview — in newly-elected President Donald Trump.
Recounting a meeting where he seemed to have angered Trump by contradicting him, Comey tells us that the encounter had left him “shaken” for he had “never seen anything like it in the Oval Office” under the previous two presidents he had served.
“As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organisation above morality and above the truth,” he writes in his autobiography.
And as we go on to find out in the book, this is another aspect of the significant role that Comey would play in the 2016 US Presidential Election, apart from his decisions on “the matter” (the word is significant, as we learn) of Hillary Clinton’s email server being perceived as having damaged her campaign.
These interactions with Trump, where Comey’s “loyalty” was sought in the wake of the probe into Russian support/links against his campaign team and he was even purportedly told to drop the case against a recently-resigned aide (National Security Adviser Michael Flynn), could have far-reaching consequences — for the new President.
While Comey was unceremoniously fired, his claims would lead to a Special Counsel investigation that has reached uncomfortably close to Trump — Luke Harding’s “Collusion — How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House” shows how.
But while around half of Comey’s book is devoted to his decisions and experiences in the Clinton and Trump episodes, it has much more than these two major issues, and is certainly not an explosive, tell-all account — he is too principled and conscientious a lawyer and public servant to reveal what is the court’s domain to the public.
But it does clarify his position in the Clinton matter, where he seeks to explain what the issue was all about, and what lay behind him telling Congress in October 2016 — a few days prior to the election — that the probe was being reopened.
As he reveals, the decision hinged on whether to inform Congress — which could influence the election — or conceal it — which could have been as problematic for the FBI if evidence of prosecutable criminal activity emerged later. “Put that way, the choice between a ‘really bad option’ and a ‘catastrophic option’ was not that hard a call,” he argues.
This is Comey’s memoir with the parts on Clinton and Trump the highlights, but the good lawyer he is, he builds up to them, showing why he acted the way he did by detailing his formative influences and his career.
These include the childhood experience when a criminal burst into his home and threatened him and his brother, a wise boss at the department store where he worked part-time, bullies at school, and encounters with the Mafia bosses and killers as US Attorney.
Then, as Deputy Attorney General in the George W. Bush Presidency, there was the “Stellar Wind” surveillance — where he had to forestall two senior administration officials trying to obtain a hospitalised Attorney General’s concurrence — and torture of terrorists and terrorist suspects by the CIA, and being appointed FBI chief by Barack Obama in 2013.
While the comparison of the three Presidents — and their cabinet colleagues — is well brought out and extensive (say, their political styles to sense of humour — or lack thereof), the main point is their attitude to justice, or rather to those tasked with ensuring it. As we learn from history, and increasingly from the news, there is no doubt what the rankings will be.
This, along with Comey’s observations on the ethics of leadership and the pursuit of justice free from any political considerations, is what makes this book more than a political memoir.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Former FBI Director James Comey
Washington : Former FBI Director James Comey in his first exclusive interview since he was fired last May said that Donald Trump was “morally unfit” to be the President of the US.
In the exclusive ABC News interview on Sunday night, Comey dismissed claims made by some that Trump was medically unfit to hold office.
“I often hear people talk about it. I don’t buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or early stages of dementia. He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who’s tracking conversations and knows what’s going on,” Comey said.
“I don’t think he’s medically unfit to be president. I think he’s morally unfit to be president.
“A person who treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds,” Comey added.
The interview comes ahead of the release of his tell-all book “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership” on Tuesday.
Also a lawyer, Comey told ABC News that he was standing in the middle of the Los Angeles Federal Bureau of Investigation field office on May 9, 2017, thanking employees and the building’s support staff for their hard work, when he saw the televisions on the wall flash “Comey Resigns”.
“One of the many great things about the FBI is we have some hilarious pranksters, and so I thought it was a scam by someone on my staff…”
As the TVs in the bureau started to show the news on other networks, he saw some were displaying the words “Comey Fired”.
“The audience could see my face change,” he said.
Comey said his reaction to the news was disbelief. “That’s crazy… How could that be?”
He received a call from then-Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly who was “very upset” with the news and was thinking about quitting too.
Comey said he urged Kelly to remain in the administration.
The former FBI Director said that he was “actually nervous” to meet Trump in person.
“I’m about to meet a person who doesn’t know me, who’s just been elected president of the United States… And I’m about to talk to him about allegations that he was involved with prostitutes in Moscow and that the Russians taped it and have leverage over him.
“He had impressively coiffed hair, his tie was too long as it always is, he looked slightly orange up close with small white half-moons under his eyes, which I assume are from tanning goggles,” he said.
When asked if the Russians had something on Trump, Comey said: “I think it’s possible. I don’t know… These are more words I never thought I’d utter about a president of the United States, but it’s possible.”
Comey told ABC News that he knew the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was going to present a “no-win situation” for him.
Comey revealed that while he did not vote in the 2016 election saying that as the FBI director he was “trying to be outside of politics” and there were a lot of Clinton supporters in his family.
—IANS
