Former FBI Director James Comey’s infamous dossier briefing with President Donald Trump may have been a set-up.
In January 2017, Comey met with then-president-elect Trump to apprise him of the infamous Christopher Steele dossier, one of several meetings that Comey recorded in his now equally infamous memos. But according to the scathing Inspector General (IG) report released Thursday, Comey planned the meeting out with FBI agents to spy on Trump in case he said anything related to the ongoing Russia investigation — and The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York was the first to catch the bombshell.
The “salient details”
Comey kept at least seven memos, including four that he secretly kept copies of in a safe inside his house. The former FBI director later admitted to leaking one of these memos to The New York Times to spark a special counsel probe into the president, according to Fox News.
Comey has long maintained that he saw the memos as personal diary entries that he felt obligated to keep out of a sense of duty, but the Office of the Inspector General’s (OIG) report paints his “higher loyalty” in a much darker light. Comey reportedly planned his January 2017 Trump Tower briefing with Trump with the purpose of secretly recording the president-elect.
“Witnesses interviewed by the OIG…said that they discussed Trump’s potential responses to being told about the ‘salacious’ information, including that Trump might make statements about, or provide information of value to, the pending Russian interference investigation,” the report reads. “Multiple FBI witnesses recalled agreeing ahead of time that Comey should memorialize his meeting with Trump immediately after it occurred. Comey told the OIG that, in his view, it was important for FBI executive managers to be ‘able to share in [Comey’s] recall of the…salient details of those conversations.'”
Like something out of an espionage movie, Comey had a laptop waiting for him in his FBI vehicle so he could begin immediately writing down his conversation with Trump. Comey later gave a quick run-down of his conversation to top FBI officials, including Andrew McCabe and James Baker, through a teleconference call.
He later wrote a classified email to “other Intelligence Community Directors” to give them a summary of the meeting, according to the IG’s report. The report goes on:
Comey told the OIG he began writing Memo 1 immediately following his meeting with Trump on January 6, 2017. Comey said he had a secure FBI laptop waiting for him in his FBI vehicle and that when he got into the vehicle, he was handed the laptop and “began typing [Memo 1] as the vehicle moved.”
He said he continued working on Memo 1 until he arrived at the FBI’s New York field office, where Comey gave a “quick download” of his conversation with President-elect Trump to [James] Rybicki, McCabe, Baker, and supervisors of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigative team via secure video teleconference (SVTC).
“Disingenuous at best”
While Comey has sought to portray the briefing as an attempt to warn Trump of the dossier before the media got hold of it, in practice, the briefing seems to have functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Days after, CNN reported about the briefing, introducing the dossier and the Russia collusion hoax to the public.
While some media outlets had the dossier, it was Comey’s briefing that provided the veneer of legitimacy to publish it. As York aptly explains, the whole thing was an “ambush,” and Comey’s attempts to explain it later were deceptive:
Comey tried to talk Trump out of his suspicions. “Comey said that, among other things, he remembered telling Trump that the source of the information was ‘not a government document, and it’s not classified,’” the report said. “Comey also remembered telling Trump that to ‘speak of it as a leak doesn’t make sense’ because ‘a lot of people in Washington had [the information],’ and Comey said he told Trump that he had previously warned Trump that it might soon be published by the media.”
“Comey’s explanation was disingenuous at best,” York added. He went on:
Leaked information could be terribly damaging whether or not it was classified. And yes, some media figures had the dossier — Steele had been desperately trying to get them to report it for months. But the media did not know that Comey had briefed Trump on the Moscow sex story.
That was the leak that gave the media the go-ahead to report on the existence of the dossier and then for BuzzFeed to publish the whole thing. If it was important enough for the nation’s top intel chiefs to brief the president-elect, wasn’t it important enough for the public to know? It was the leak of the meeting that set off the chain of events surrounding the dossier and the Trump Tower briefing.
“A dangerous example”
All in all, the 83-page IG report gave Comey a brutal dressing down, saying that the FBI director set a “dangerous example” for the FBI by sharing a memo with the media through a friend with the intention of “creating public pressure” to spark an investigation into Trump. Comey was also found to have violated FBI policy and his employment agreement by secretly keeping copies of the four memos, and providing copies to his attorneys, even after he was fired in May 2017.
“By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees — and the many thousands more former FBI employees — who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information,” the report said.
In light of the misconduct described throughout the IG report, and what was already known of Comey’s prejudice against Trump, the dossier briefing looks more like a politically motivated set-up than ever.
No comments: