“MAJOR INCONSISTENCIES”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Sep. 18, 2019) — During the 7:00 a.m. EDT hour of Wednesday’s “Fox & Friends,” “House Freedom Caucus” members Jim Jordan (R-OH4) and Mark Meadows (R-NC11) said they will be questioning DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz later today about “inconsistencies” they found between former FBI Director James Comey’s congressional testimony and Horowitz’s report issued late last month focusing on Comey’s dissemination of memos he wrote early in 2017.
Jordan is a member of the House Judiciary Committee and two subcommittees as well as the ranking member of the House Oversight & Reform Committee. Meadows is a member of the Oversight & Reform Committee chaired by Rep. Elijah Cummings as well as a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He is a ranking member of two respective subcommittees.
During their conversation with co-host Brian Kilmeade, Jordan opined on Tuesday’s hearing with witness and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski (begins at 33:11).
Jordan told Kilmeade that he asked Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler when the committee will have the opportunity to have Horowitz testify, the answer to which Jordan said was, “I don’t know; I haven’t thought about that.”
Meadows claimed that Democrats “are afraid of the truth” in regard to the Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative which a 22-month Special Counsel investigation found to be unsubstantiated in a report delivered to the Justice Department in March.
Kilmeade reported that a hearing today marks “an anniversary of inspector generals” [sic] (35:23) at which Horowitz will speak. “How are you going to cut through the ceremonial portion of the hearing and get to, maybe, some substantive answers, Jim?” he asked.
Jordan responded, “Well, we’re going to ask him about the report that we should have had a hearing on, frankly, but Mr. Nadler and Mr. Cummings haven’t scheduled it; we’ll ask him about the report he released three weeks ago. Specifically, I’m going to ask him a little bit about what took place at the Trump Tower meeting when it was President-Elect Trump, because we all just assumed they went up there to brief the president on the dossier so they could then leak that information and the press would print the dossier, which we know is complete garbage, but we also learned from Mr. Horowitz’s report: they went up to that meeting trying to set up the president, trying to trap the president, ’cause immediately after that meeting, Jim Comey goes out, gets in his secure car on his secure laptop and starts typing notes, and Mr. Horowitz points out on page 17 and 18 of his report that they were looking to get information about their pending investigation, about the Trump-Russia investigation, all the while Jim Comey is telling the president, ‘You’re not under investigation.’ That is so wrong; I want to make sure we get into that a little bit today and a whole host of other questions as well.”
Meadows then said, “What we now have is when Jim and I were in there actually during congressional testimony asking Jim Comey questions, he gave conflicting answers with what the inspector general has reported. So now what we’ve done is we’ve gone over his testimony and the inspector general’s report and we find major inconsistencies. So today, hopefully, some of that will come out. And that’s not what the hearing’s about, because the Democrats wouldn’t call him in, Michael Horowitz, to go over this scathing report, but we’ll take that opportunity early and often to make sure the truth gets out to the American people.”
Page 17 of Horowitz’s August 29, 2019 report states, in part:
Witnesses interviewed by the OIG also 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. That FBI counterintelligence investigation, known as “Crossfire Hurricane,” concerned whether individuals associated with the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election were coordinating with, or had been unwittingly co-opted by, the Russian government.
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.”…
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 Rybicki, McCabe, Baker, and supervisors of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigative team via secure video teleconference (SVTC)…