THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 6/8/17 PART ONE

Holy Shit James Comey Edition

Tonight’s Part One of TWIPN will focus only on Comey’s testimony. But there’s a lot of other news had wanted to write about, so I am planning to write a follow-up Part Two tomorrow. We’ll see if that actually happens.

THE BIG PICTURE: Former FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee today. Here are the most important bombshells of his testimony, starting with the un-effing-believable prepared remarks that were released in advance of the hearing yesterday:

1. Trump repeatedly pressured Comey to say that he was not under investigation, and Comey refused.
2. Trump told Comey at a private one-on-one dinner, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” At the end of the dinner, Trump again said, “I need loyalty.”
3. Comey’s viewed the dinner with Trump was “an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship.”
4. Comey discussed Trump’s request that the Flynn investigation be dropped with other FBI leadership, but he did not tell Sessions, because he believed Sessions was essentially compromised on the Russia investigation (more on that below).

And now the most important parts from the live testimony today:

1. Comey testified unequivocally that Trump’s request regarding the Flynn investigation was a “direction.”
2. Comey appeared to confirm that Mueller was investigating whether Trump’s actions amount to obstruction of justice: “I'm sure the special counsel will work towards to find out the intention there and whether that's an offense.”
3. Comey repeatedly called Trump a liar, and used the word “lie.” At the very start of the hearing, he said that Trump’s initial stated reasons for firing him -- “that the organization [the FBI] was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader” -- “were lies, plain and simple,” and that they were attempts to “defame” Comey and the FBI. A few minutes later, Comey explained that he was driven to document his interactions with Trump after the very first meeting because “I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting so I thought it important to document.” And then when Angus King walked him through a series of statements Trump had made, Comey repeatedly explained that those statements were “not true.”
4. Comey admitted that he had leaked his own memos to counteract Trump’s lies about his firing. This is a big deal, and will be the focus of the Republicans’ pushback, painting Comey as a “leaker” instead of a truth-teller. As Josh Marshall reminds us, “Trump and his team have conflated leaks which people have every legal right to do (and they can also be fired for it) with classified leaks, which are illegal. Trump . . . come[s] out of a world of pervasive NDAs and attorney-client privilege and want to think that people who work in the executive branch have that kind of obligation to President Trump. They don’t.”
5. Comey confirmed that Russia interfered in our election: “The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. It was an active measures campaign driven from the top of that government. There is no fuzz on that. It is a high confidence judgment of the entire intelligence community and the members of this committee have seen the intelligence. It's not a close call. That happened. That's about as unfake as you can possibly get.”
6. Most Republicans continue not only to not care, but to actively cover for Trump. More on that below.

QUESTIONS COMEY COULDN’T ANSWER IN AN OPEN SETTING: Chris Hayes put together all the questions Comey could not answer in an open setting:

1. The Steele dossier (ie, the “pee tape”).
2. Whether Flynn was/is a “central figure” in the investigation into Russian interference.
3. Russian bank VEB, whose official Kushner met with after the election (and then failed to report it when asked under oath to disclose all contacts with foreign officials).
4. Whether Trump colluded with Russia.
5. Whether there was contact between Trump associates and Russian officials.

JEFF SESSIONS IS IN TROUBLE: In his prepared testimony, Comey said that he discussed the February 14 meeting with Trump (the one where Trump asked him to shut down the Flynn investigation) with FBI colleagues but not AG Sessions, because they believed Sessions would soon be recused from the Russia investigation. Today, he testified that he and his FBI colleagues were “aware of facts that I can't discuss in an open setting, that would make [Sessions’] continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic.” But in fact, Sessions didn’t recuse himself for another two weeks, on March 2, and then said it was because he had been a Trump campaign surrogate (and that was one day after the Washington Post reported that Sessions had lied, under oath, in his confirmation hearing about meeting with the Russian ambassador). So why was Comey convinced two weeks earlier, before the Post story, that Sessions would recuse? And more tantalizingly, why coudn’t Comey comment about it in an open setting? Josh Barro comments: “Obviously, Sessions' role as a surrogate and adviser to Trump during the 2016 campaign is not classified and is not a matter that Comey would have had to reserve for a closed session. So, Comey's account of Sessions' recusal directly contradicts Sessions' own public account of why he recused himself.” P.S. In a closed meeting this afternoon, Comey reportedly said that Sessions may have had a third undisclosed meeting with Ambassador Kislyak.

THE CRAVENNESS OF THE GOP, PART 6,749: This testimony is a big deal. We have the head of the FBI testifying, under oath, that Trump repeatedly attempted to get him to shut down an investigation into his friend; repeatedly pressured him to make public pronouncement about his (Trumps’) own supposed innocence; and then fired him when he refused. Yet most of the Republicans on the committee were intent on covering for Trump. The first line of defense was that Trump used the word “hope,” when he said “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” insisting that it was not a “demand” and so couldn’t be an attempt to interfere with the investigation. Comey make quick work with that one -- telling Sen. Risch that he “took it as a direction.” But also, kids, let’s not forget that when Comey didn’t comply, he was fired. I don’t quite understand the parsing of the words, when we know the outcome. When a mob boss comes by and says to you, “Nice shop you’ve got here. I sure hope it doesn’t burn down in a fire,” and then you don’t pay him, and then it burns down in a fire, I don’t think the use of the word “hope” is the salient part of that interaction here. I think it’s the fire.

Anyway, the two most despicable displays were from Marco Rubio (shocker) and John Cornyn, the Texas senator who was Trump’s top pick to replace Comey before being talked out of it (probably because he looks like he comes from “central casting”). Rubio asked only leading questions demanding a yes or no answer -- not the tactic one takes when one is searching for the truth, rather than corroborating a pre-determined narrative. Rubio pressed Comey on why he didn’t take more action to tell the President to, essentially, knock it off with the illegal interference stuff. And then he concluded by saying that Trump only asked “three things” of Comey: (1) for loyalty; (2) “He asked you on one occasion to let the Mike Flynn thing go because he was a good guy,” something Trump said publicly on TV the very next day (that Flynn had been treating badly); and (3) “can you please tell the American people what these leaders in congress already know, which you already know and what you told me three times, that I'm not under personally under investigation.” Rubio’s minimizing is truly breathtaking. Oh, and then he lied, saying that “the only thing never leaked [to the press] is the fact the president was never personally under investigation.” That’s not true; that Trump wasn’t the target of an investigation was reported in multiple places. Tonight, Rubio tweeted out his outrage that a Miami paper accurately reported his Trump water-carrying.

And then John Cornyn used his time to ask about Hillary Clinton’s emails. I shit you not.

This is the best the GOP can come up with; Paul Ryan declared today that Trump can’t be faulted because he just is an idiot who doesn’t know anything: “He’s just new to this.” This is insane, as Brian Beutler points out: “Ryan wants us to imagine Trump sitting alone in the White House with only his intellect and his muscle memory as his guides. He asks us implicitly to forget that Trump has a White House counsel, a vice president with years of governing experience, and an attorney general who campaigned with him for a year, all at his behest to instruct him. He asks us, again implicitly, to forget that Trump pierced the veil meant to separate the White House and FBI, to corrupt the rule of law, and that he then fired FBI Director James Comey, lied about why, and confessed—to NBC’s Lester Holt, and to senior Russian officials in the Oval Office—that he did it to remove “the cloud” of Comey’s investigation of his campaign.” As Matt Yglesias notes, “This is part of an ongoing process of Republicans lowering the bar for Trump’s statements and conduct in a way that is both nonsensical and dangerous. . . . Either he has the character, intellect, temperament, and disposition to do the job properly or he doesn’t.” (Read this very good Ezra Klein article on the American crisis that is Trump’s presidency.)

COOL GRAPHIC OF THE DAY: Here’s an amazing visual of how the three main cable networks covered the Comey hearing.

BONUS RESEARCH: During his questionning, GOP Sen. Risch suggested that the use of the word “hope” was never enough in court to convict someone of obstruction. My friend David Lebowtiz makes eviscerating stupidity look easy:

Jim Risch -- since you seemed curious, yes, statements like those Director Comey described in his testimony are legally sufficient to constitute obstruction of justice. See, e.g., United States v. McDonald, 521 F.3d 975, 979 (8th Cir. 2008) (affirming sentence enhancement for obstruction of justice where defendant told witness "I hope and pray to God you did not say anything"); United States v. Johnson, 46 F.3d 636, 638 (7th Cir. 1995) (same, for statement ”I hope you aren't doing what I think you're doing”); U.S. v. Lazzerini, 611 F.2d 940, 942 (1st Cir. 1979) (upholding obstruciton conviction for "[c]onveying of information in a specially arranged and urgent visit . . . that a party on trial was a friend . . . and a 'nice guy'"); United States v. Jenkins, 122 F. Supp. 3d 639, 655 (E.D. Ky. 2013) (upholding obstruction enhancement for statement “I just hope you don't really get up on the stand and testify on me babe that would hurt me so bad that would broke what little heart I have left.")

FOR FURTHER READING: It is now 35 minutes past my bedtime, and I am waking up in six hours, so I need to wrap this up. But I didn’t have time to read Lawfare’s coverage of today’s hearing, and I’m sure there was great stuff up there. So check it out.

PREVIEW FOR TOMORROW/LATER THIS WEEKEND: If I can summon the energy, tomorrow or later this weekend I’ll cover the other bombshell bananas congressional testimony today; the rapidly moving efforts to repeal Obamacare (efforts that are LIKELY TO SUCCEED if we don’t focus all our energies over the next three weeks; the House vote Thursday to repeal Dodd Frank (because who wants to prevent another financial crisis anyway?); and hopefully the British elections.