Trump Calls Comey a “Liar,” Contradicts McCabe

“CAN WE CALL THEM FAKE MEMOS?”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Mar. 18, 2018) — In Twitter comments beginning on Saturday, President Donald J. Trump responded to the termination of Former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe on Friday night by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the ongoing “Russia” investigation as to whether or not Trump or any of his campaign aides “colluded” with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 election.

At approximately 10:00 PM EDT on Friday, the Justice Department issued a written statement confirming that McCabe was fired while awaiting the inception of his $1.8 million pension after being placed on “terminal leave” in January.

“After an extensive and fair investigation and according to Department of Justice procedure, the Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) provided its report on allegations of misconduct by Andrew McCabe to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR),” the statement begins.

McCabe has been under investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General since before Trump took office on January 20 of last year.

In the wake of Sessions’s announcement, the major media appears to have sympathized with McCabe, who immediately issued a statement of his own upon learning of his termination. In that missive, McCabe claimed that he and his family were “the targets of an unrelenting assault on our reputation and my service to this country.”

He claimed that the FBI has become “politicized” and that some of his responses to questions may have been misinterpreted as he attempted to deal with the “chaos” around him.

Last May, Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey, who tweeted his support for McCabe on Friday night.  On Saturday, Comey tweeted that in light of the expected publication of his book next month, “the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.”

On Sunday, Trump pointed out the contradiction between Comey and McCabe regarding information that reached the media last year about a Clinton investigation, an item the Inspector General reportedly used as a reason to recommend discipline for McCabe.

At approximately 8:15 a.m. EDT, Trump tweeted, “Wow, watch Comey lie under oath to Senator G when asked ‘have you ever been an anonymous source…or known someone else to be an anonymous source…?’ He said strongly ‘never, no.’ He lied as shown clearly on @foxandfriends.”

“Senator G” is Sen. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who questioned Comey under oath just before he was fired as to whether or not he had ever been “an anonymous source about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation,” to which Comey responded, “No, never.”

However, in his statement, McCabe said that when he released the information in question to the media in coordination with a legal adviser, the “Director” — Comey at the time — was aware of it.

In testimony given approximately a month after he was fired, Comey admitted having leaked a number of memos he reportedly created documenting his encounters with Trump to his friend Daniel Richman in order to instigate the appointment of a special counsel to lead the “Russia” investigations which the FBI had begun.

Richman had provided one of the memos to The New York Times, which quoted from it but did not show the actual document.  In fact, Times writer Michael S. Schmidt said that neither he nor any of his colleagues had “viewed a copy of the memo.”

Both Comey and McCabe reportedly signed surveillance warrants using the “Trump dossier” as a basis upon which to gain access to then-Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page’s communications between October 2016 in June of last year.

The dossier, compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, was, according to Republicans’ accounts of McCabe’s closed-door December testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, essential in obtaining the search warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

On Friday night, McCabe denied that the dossier served as the basis of the Russia investigations.  “We started the investigations without the dossier. We were proceeding with the investigations before we ever received that information. Was the dossier material important to the package? Of course, it was. As was every fact included in that package. Was it the majority of what was in the package? Absolutely not,” McCabe told CNN in an article “Updated 11:19 PM ET.”

In response to McCabe’s claim on Saturday that like Comey, he kept memos allegedly memorializing his meetings with Trump, Trump tweeted, “Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me. I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?”

While both McCabe and Comey claim that the Trump administration has attempted to impugn their reputations and that of the agency they served, neither man launched an investigation into the issue which Trump catapulted into the news in 2011:  the question of Barack Hussein Obama’s constitutional eligibility to serve as president and commander-in-chief.

A “long-form” birth certificate image posted at whitehouse.gov several months after Trump began publicly and vociferously questioning Obama’s origins was found by a five-year criminal investigation to be a “computer-generated forgery.”

Neither the FBI nor the DOJ has responded to questions from this writer as to why an investigation into the claim of forgery has not taken place.