Comey's Credibility Is A Problem For Trump

Former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee set official Washington aflame. The bombshells dropped left and right, from Comey calling the sitting President of the United States a liar on multiple occasions to his intimation that the current Attorney General may have had (another) undisclosed meeting with Russian officials. With so much to unpack, it is easy to get lost in the weeds. But by the end of the day, the President’s lawyer had distilled this politically (and legally) explosive event into something much easier to understand - a “he said/he said” credibility contest between Comey and Trump as it relates to the question of whether Trump asked Comey to end his investigation into the activities of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

And it is easy to understand why this matters. If it can be proven that the President directed Comey to end the investigation, it would be a clear case of obstruction of justice that any first-year law student could prosecute. Republican partisans have chosen to make two arguments - first, that Trump did not “order” Comey to end the investigation, just that he “hoped” he would end it; and second, (and this is the excuse used by Paul Ryan) that Trump is simply naive about the ways of Washington and politics and did not understand the gravity of what he was doing. No big deal, no harm, no foul.

But here is the thing. This is not a “he said/he said” situation where it is simply one person’s word against another’s. The public record we have indicates that the conversation in question, which happened the day after Flynn resigned, happened only after Trump cleared the room of his Vice President, his Chief of Staff, his son-in-law (who is also his adviser), and the Attorney General. Hardly the type of action of a babe in the woods but definitely the type of action of someone who would not want anyone else to able to corroborate what happened behind closed doors. 

Further, Trump may not have expected Comey to create a contemporaneous record of that meeting, but Comey did. That is very significant because contemporaneous notes are considered so credible, they can be admitted into evidence as an exception from the hearsay rule. (See, FRE 803). In other words, a contemporaneous memo written by someone at the time or immediately after an event occurs that describes that event is considered so reliable it is admissible in court to prove the truth of the matter asserted therein. 

But it is not just Comey’s testimony about that meeting or his memo that should be considered. As he stated before the Senate, he also shared the subject matter of his conversations with the President with at least five of his closest aides, including his Deputy Director and Chief of Staff. All of those men (and they are all men, which is another story for another time) could (and should) be called to testify about what Comey told them.

On top of all this is the context in which Trump's meetings with Comey took place. Sally Yates testified before Congress that she warned White House Counsel Don McGahn on January 26th that Michael Flynn had been compromised by the Russians. Less than 24 hours later, Trump had a private dinner with Comey where he (Trump) attempted to extract a "loyalty" pledge from Comey (according to Comey). Flynn resigned on February 13th. Trump's one-on-one with Comey, the meeting where Trump sent out everyone else from the room and asked Comey to drop the investigation occurred, you guessed it, less than 24 hours later - on February 14th.

The near-contemporaneous connection between disclosures about Flynn and his resignation and Trump's meetings with the man investigating those indiscretions belies the idea that Trump is some naive newcomer unversed in the ways of Washington. The temporal connection also suggests motive - we don't know (yet) whether McGahn shared what Yates told him with Trump, but it is hard to imagine a White House Counsel keeping such information to himself. Assuming McGahn shared what Yates told him with Trump, the idea of his asking Comey for "loyalty" does not seem far fetched. Similarly, once Flynn was turfed out (purportedly for lying to the Vice President about his meetings with Russian officials) it is not hard to connect that dot to a request by Trump to drop any further investigation into Flynn - the poor guy had suffered enough <eye roll>. 

On top of Comey’s testimony, his memos, and the statements he made to his senior advisors and aides is reporting by the Washington Post that Trump asked Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, and Admiral Michael Rogers, the Director of the National Security Agency, to speak with Comey about scuttling the Flynn investigation. Neither Coats nor Rogers would answer questions posed by Senators about the veracity of the reporting, but importantly, the Post reporting indicates that Coats shared the substance of his conversation with Trump with his own aides and Rogers created a written record. Coats’s aides should be called to testify and Rogers’s memo subpoenaed. 

And if all of that was not enough, of course you have the coup de grậce - Trump fired Comey and then went on national television and said the reason for the firing was the FBI’s continued investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. 

The idea that Trump simply expressed a “hope” to Comey that the case could be closed is belied by the extensive after-the-fact action Trump took with Coats, with Rogers, and ultimately, in firing Comey when he refused to stand down. And against that mountain of evidence that Trump sought an end to the FBI’s investigation into Michael Flynn - which is itself a greater interference in a criminal investigation than what the House of Representatives deemed obstruction of justice during Watergate - you have a man who settled a fraud case less than a week before he was sworn into office, has been sued thousands to times, and whose lies are so voluminous reporters have tallied hundreds in the less than six months he has been in office. All Trump has is his oft-repeated phrase “believe me.” Believe him? Hardly.

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Trump's Firing Of Comey Is A BFD

President Trump’s firing of James Comey has created a shit storm in Washington, D.C. that should be lighting everyone’s hair on fire. Comey’s protectors in the media are quick to rush to his defense, both generally, and specifically as to his actions over the past year. But here’s the thing. If you’re James Comey, you don’t rise to some of the most politically sensitive positions in government (U.S. Attorney for the S.D.N.Y. - the pre-eminent U.S. Attorney’s Office in the nation, Deputy Attorney General and FBI Director) without some savvy. The media’s willingness to constantly give him the benefit of the doubt lacks credulity, but at the same time, people need to understand that Democrats who were outraged at his actions during the campaign can also be outraged that his firing appeared to be a pre-textual (and pre-emptive) effort by a sitting President to shut down a criminal investigation into his campaign (and possibly Trump himself). 

It should be said that neither Clinton nor Trump was entitled to preferential treatment by Comey, but by the same token, they should not have been given worse treatment, which is what happened in Hillary’s case. When Comey gave a press conference in July 2016 to announce there would be no recommendation of charges against Hillary, he tiptoed near the line of impropriety - it is rare for an investigation that results in no charges being filed to be announced publicly; however, if you accept that in the public interest it made sense to say something, his editorializing went well beyond his charge and was, naturally, turned into convenient sound bites for political attack ads and ad nauseum coverage on cable news. Comey’s intervention just eleven days before the election was even more egregious, both because it flouted clear DOJ guidelines on making public statements so close to an election, but also because it was done without having facts behind it that might have mattered. 

The media’s willingness to give Comey a pass - bemoaning the “impossible” position he was in - has turned out to be too cute by half. The prudent course for Comey, had he treated Hillary like any other person under investigation but never charged, would have been to keep his mouth shut the entire time. Indeed, prosecutors do this for two primary reasons - (1) so an innocent person’s good name isn’t sullied if he or she is never charged with a crime; and (2) to avoid tainting the investigation. When word leaked after the election (curious timing, no?) that the FBI had an open and active investigation against the Trump campaign dating to last summer, his actions looked even more partisan and indefensible and the media’s defense, laughable. 

So why is that his termination by Trump is so offensive? After all, Comey blurred the lines (or eradicated them entirely) during the campaign. But here’s the thing - with an active investigation into Trump’s associates (and possibly Trump himself) going on, for Trump to remove Comey is precisely the type of malfeasance post-Watergate changes were designed to protect against, including the “wall” between the White House and the Department of Justice as it relates to criminal investigations and the 10-year term (which was established after Watergate in 1976) the idea being the FBI Director should, to some degree, be insulated from the political process. 

If it turns out that Trump removed Comey in an effort to sideline or stop an investigation into his campaign’s contacts with agents of the Russian government or, worse, actively collaborated with them, that itself would be grounds for impeachment; whatever else may be discovered would simply be icing on the cake. There are few agencies in our government more important to the functioning of our nation than the Department of Justice; thus, injecting politics into the DOJ is particularly fraught with peril. One of the reasons an independent counsel makes sense is because the nature of the Trump/Russia investigation is so sensitive and the appearance of a conflict so apparent, someone who cannot be removed by the President or Attorney General is needed. Once upon a time, Republicans believed in this concept; conveniently, it was when some guy named Bill Clinton was President. My, how times have changed. 

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Hillary & Her Damn Emails

The collective media narrative is that FBI Director James Comey did severe political damage to Hillary Clinton in his public statements explaining why he and his investigators unanimously recommended against pursuing charges against the former Secretary of State. According to the media, his public statement on July 5^th contradicted a number of Mrs. Clinton’s claims and he then provided hours of testimony on Capitol Hill two days later which made her look even worse.

The confluence of politics and the law is a tricky one - optics matter more in the former, facts in the latter. But what the media owes the public is accuracy and conflating Comey’s statements with the idea that Mrs. Clinton’s actions reinforce the belief she is untrustworthy is an editorial decision divorced from the facts in this case. Members of the media like to hide behind the idea that they are simply reporting on what polling or interviews with the public tell them, but this excuses their own responsibility for shaping that narrative.

Comey’s most sensational claim was that classified emails – that were classified at the time they were sent of received – were found on Clinton’s email server. This seemed to contradict Mrs. Clinton’s statement that she neither sent nor received classified email. Here is what Comey said:

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification …

Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

Seems pretty scandalous right? But Comey was being a bit of a slippery lawyer. The “very small number” of email that were marked classified at the time turned out to be three – yes, three. Not three thousand, or three hundred, or even thirty, but three. In other words, one one-hundredth of one percent (.01%) of the roughly 30,000 email the FBI reviewed were marked as classified. It was not until two days later at Comey’s Congressional hearing, that we learned the rest of the story:

In short, contrary to State Department policy, which connotes an email’s classification in the header, here, the markings were buried somewhere in the email strings where they could have easily been missed. More importantly, it turned out these three email were improperly marked – a fact shared by the State Department within hours of Comey’s press conference.

So, none of the three email Comey mentioned in his press conference turned out to be classified. But what about the 110 emails that were classified at the time, of which eight were top secret? Again, the colloquy is helpful. None of those email bore markings showing they were classified. In other words, the State Department did not think these email were classified at the time, it was the FBI’s call after-the-fact. As Comey conceded, absent some notation in the heading of an email that the subject matter is classified, the recipient of the email could reasonably conclude it was not classified.

In any event, those eight email (out of 30,000) that were top secret? Seven had to do with drone strikes in countries where their leaders demand plausible deniability yet everyone knows attacks occur (e.g., Pakistan and Yemen). The other email was a run-of-the-mill description of a conversation with the President of Malawi. Yes, Malawi, a country few people even know exists and even fewer could find on a map.

In sum, the “small number” of email that bore classified markings were all in error and none of the other 110 email had markings. Of the eight (out of 30,000) supposedly “top secret” email, seven were on a subject widely reported on but kept secret solely to protect our allies and the eighth had notes on a conversation with a leader of a country no one has even heard of.

The other Comey statement getting a lot of attention is this one:

Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. 

This comment seems to contradict one by Secretary Clinton that she used only one device. But here’s the thing. Comey never explained what he meant by “numerous devices.” Apple now has a program that lets you upgrade your iPhone every year. Are you using “multiple devices” when you go from the iPhone 6 to the iPhone 7? It may be that Comey and Clinton are both telling the truth in that she perceived swapping out her phones as using “one device” and he interprets that same action as using “numerous devices.” Is this really grounds for a perjury investigation?

This was bad enough, but Comey layered his own opinions (a real no no for an investigator and something, as a former U.S. Attorney, he should know better than doing) and speculation. There were two particularly egregious examples:

Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.

Here, he engages in rank speculation without any factual support, a cardinal sin that any first-year law student would know not to do.

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

This little nugget ended up being one of Comey’s most quoted lines, but aside from suffering from the same opinion testimony any good prosecutor would know to avoid, taken together with the context of the rest of his statement, it is also untrue. As Comey would later admit, none of the email he considered classified were designated as such at the time and without the markings, a person could infer they were not confidential. So how is it that Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” when less than 1% of her email were classified (not that she would have known that, as per Comey’s own statement!) and the three (out of 30,000) that had markings turned out not be classified at all. It does not make sense and it also supports Hillary’s statement that she neither received nor sent classified information – the documents Comey said were classified at the time either bore no markings to show that they were or had markings, but turned out not be classified at all.

For Comey, this whole episode is a perfect illustration of why prosecutors typically do not make statements when charges are not filed. We are all entitled to the presumption of innocence and that right is even greater when a criminal investigation concludes without evidence sufficient to charge us with a crime. When a prosecutor decides instead to inject his own opinion it denigrates an innocent person’s reputation for reasons that have nothing to do with a legal determination of their guilt or innocence.

For reporters, this is another in a long litany of examples this campaign season where they went with the sizzle instead of the steak. All of the information I wrote about above was readily available to them if they were doing their jobs and putting this type of context into their stories. Instead, as is more and more common these days, they skipped right past the facts and ran right for the political angle that reinforced their preferred narrative.

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