Comey's Prepared Statement Released

Comey's Prepared Statement Released

By barefooted on Wed, 06/07/2017 - 3:38pm |

Get the popcorn ready ...

URL:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/07/politics/james-comey-memos-testimony/index.html

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The pushback war room has been outsourced because West Wing peeps are ascared. And unlike their boss, they probably listen to their lawyers when told by them to shut the fuck up:

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/07/trump-comey-attacks-messaging-239269

by artappraiser on Wed, 06/07/2017 - 8:23pm

Comey’s Political Shrewdness Is on Display in Tussle With Trump

By Peter Baker and Glenn Thrush @ NYTimes.com,, June 7

[.....] “At every turn since his firing, Comey has played his hand perfectly, controlling the narrative and preserving his well-earned reputation for integrity and professionalism, while Trump has only made his situation worse every time opened his mouth or logged onto Twitter,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. [.....]

“I did find the timing of the release a little bit interesting, directly after testimony,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokeswoman, told reporters on Air Force One as the president returned from Cincinnati.

By the end of the day, Mr. Trump’s team sought to make the best of the situation by releasing a statement from his lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, focusing on the part of Mr. Comey’s statement confirming that he had assured the president that he was not personally under investigation.

“The president feels completely and totally vindicated,” Mr. Kasowitz said, making no mention of the part of Mr. Comey’s statement asserting that the president tried to shut down an investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.

But the statement released by Mr. Kasowitz illustrated the circular nature of Washington power contests. It was distributed by Mark Corallo, a longtime Republican operative who started working for Mr. Kasowitz on Wednesday. Mr. Corallo has been a shrewd and tough player in other big Washington conflicts, including as spokesman for Representative Robert L. Livingston, a top House Republican who was set to become speaker during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 but had to resign because of his own sex scandal.[....]

Also recommended:

James Comey’s Intellectual History

By Nicholas Schmidle @ NewYorker.com's News Desk, June 7

In Comey’s view, Donald Trump’s behavior repeatedly crossed the line, making him "an obstructor"

by artappraiser on Wed, 06/07/2017 - 11:05pm

Reading Between the Lines of Comey’s Prepared Testimony @ NYTimes.com, June 7

New York Times reporters analyze prepared remarks by James
B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, that were published
Wednesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Mr. Comey is
scheduled to appear before the committee on Thursday

Two-column arrangement with yellow highlighting of Comey's, makes an easy and helpful read.

by artappraiser on Wed, 06/07/2017 - 10:53pm

Also read in text further down and it seems subpoenas to banks being issued re: possible Trump money laundering?

Others mentioned potential conflicts with clients of their firms, such as financial institutions that have already received subpoenas relating to potential money-laundering issues that are part of the investigation.

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 06/08/2017 - 1:26am

Peracles... Did you watch this today?

Relating to Trump money laundering? The things that Andrew McCabe knows..

Before the Senate Intelligence Committee. June 7, 2017 from TPM DC.

Acting FBI Head: Comey-Trump Talks Could Be Part Of Special Counsel Probe

Now... Let's go back to March 27, 2017 at WhoWhatWhy . . .

Why FBI Can’t Tell All on Trump, Russia

The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot tell us what we need to know about Donald Trump’s contacts with Russia. Why? Because doing so would jeopardize a long-running, ultra-sensitive operation targeting mobsters tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin — and to Trump.

But the Feds’ stonewalling risks something far more dangerous: Failing to resolve a crisis of trust in America’s president. WhoWhatWhy provides the details of a two-month investigation in this 6,500-word exposé.

The FBI apparently knew, directly or indirectly, based upon available facts, that prior to Election Day, Trump and his campaign had personal and business dealings with certain individuals and entities linked to criminal elements — including reputed Russian gangsters — connected to Putin.

//snip//

In his March 20 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, FBI Director James Comey said that he could not go into detail about its probe into the Trump administration’s Russian connection.

If he had, we might have learned that, for more than three decades the FBI has had Trump Tower in its sights. Many of its occupants have been targets of major investigations, others have been surveilled, and yet others have served as informants. One thing many of them have in common is deep ties to organized crime — including the Russian mafia.

Felix Sater fits all of these categories. A convicted felon, Sater worked in Trump Tower, made business deals with Donald Trump through Sater’s real estate firm, Bayrock, cooperated with the FBI and CIA and was subsequently protected by the DOJ from paying for his crimes. And the Moscow-born immigrant remains deeply linked to Russia and Ukraine.

Based on documents examined by WhoWhatWhy, it is possible to draw certain conclusions that help connect the dots between Trump, the FBI, Russia and the mob.

It continues-->

Now let's jump to May 15, 2017 at WhoWhatWhy and see where Andrew McCabe fits into this...

Felix Sater Links Trump to Comey’s Replacement (snippet)

It turns out that the paths of Andrew McCabe and Felix Sater intersect.

McCabe worked for 20 years in the New York field office of the FBI. According to older FBI biographical information, he joined the New York office in 1996, when he worked on “organized crime matters.” In 2003, “he became the supervisory special agent of the Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force, a joint operation with the New York City Police Department.”

“Eurasian organized crime” is the FBI designation for crime that originates from the former Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine.

Curiously, McCabe’s most recent official biography does not include this aspect of his career, and recent press profiles also do not include this fact (although older press releases do so). (This reporter could find no discussion of this period of McCabe’s career in previous press reporting).

It was the FBI’s organized crime unit in New York that investigated State Street, the mobbed-up brokerage where Felix Sater held sway in the mid-1990s. Sater has been named in numerous press reports in connection with the Russian mob. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), during hearings into Russian interference in the US election, last week noted that Sater’s family has links to organized crime and called Sater a “colorful character.” Sater’s father has been tied to the criminal organization of Semion Mogilevich, perhaps the most powerful of organized crime bosses in the former Soviet Union, and considered a national security threat by US law enforcement. Further, in 2011, former federal prosecutor Todd Kaminsky (now a New York state senator) praised Sater for his work on “Russian organized crime,” as revealed in a previously sealed court transcript, as WhoWhatWhy recently reported. (To WhoWhatWhy, Sater has denied knowledge of or connections to Eurasian mobsters.)

============

Money Laundering?

Oh my... The things that Andrew McCabe knows...

~OGD~

by oldenGoldenDecoy on Thu, 06/08/2017 - 8:26am

I see everything.

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 06/08/2017 - 10:16am

Ah the great Eckleburg of Montauk Highway. And then there's what Nick concluded after having watched the whole situation for a long time:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

by artappraiser on Thu, 06/08/2017 - 3:48pm

Yes, that's the money quote. Don & Ivanka and all the rest.

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 06/08/2017 - 4:23pm

Pence cancels interview with PBS

By Joe Concha @ TheHill.com, 06/07/17 04:08 PM EDT

[....] Vice President Pence cancelled a scheduled interview with PBS shortly before it was set to occur Wednesday afternoon, according to an executive producer at the station [....]

“We were running behind," Pence spokesman Marc Lotter explained to a pool reporter covering the vice president's visit to a NASA mission control center in Houston on Wednesday afternoon. Lotter said they had committed to reschedule.

PBS correspondent Miles O’Brien was at Johnson Space Center in Houston to conduct the pre-arranged interview with Pence. PBS also promoted the interview on the air during Tuesday night's "NewsHour," hosted by Judy Woodruff.

Pence’s cancellation came shortly after former FBI Director James Comey released his opening statement one day before his highly anticipated testimony to Congress on Thursday [....]

BTW, The Hill's big dramatic home page headline story right now is

Comey’s dramatic account on Trump rocks Washington

by artappraiser on Wed, 06/07/2017 - 11:22pm

The Hill also has this: DC bar to offer free drinks for every Trump tweet during Comey testimony They're calling it a "Covfefe" party.

And this: Ryan: It was 'obviously' inappropriate for Trump to ask Comey for loyalty

by artappraiser on Wed, 06/07/2017 - 11:40pm

OMG, they're gonna go broke. If everyone drinks that much I see massive puking and people passed out on the floor.

by ocean-kat on Wed, 06/07/2017 - 11:58pm

No free drinks. I'm thinking conspiracy. The bar owners figured out how to temporarily jam his wireless access or bribed a White House staffer to hide his cell or something like that.

by artappraiser on Thu, 06/08/2017 - 3:58pm

I think all these attacks on Trump for tweeting are very unfair. With his tiny little hands he's genetically predisposed to tweet. The rest of us would probably tweet just as much if our normal sized hands didn't make it so difficult to hit those small keys on our phones.

by ocean-kat on Thu, 06/08/2017 - 4:02pm

WaPo's Daily 202 makes an interesting point I haven't seen elsewhere (their bold)...

Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates disclosed under oath last month that, on the morning of Jan. 26th, she unambiguously warned White House Counsel Donald McGahn that the national security adviser was “compromised by the Russians” and “could be blackmailed.”

And it just so happened ...

Yesterday, Comey testified that Trump called him up at his desk around lunchtime on that very same day and asked him to come over for a one-on-one dinner a few hours later.

by barefooted on Fri, 06/09/2017 - 11:57am

Comey's Prepared Statement Released

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