Former FBI Director James Comey told senators in a closed hearing this afternoon that Attorney General Jeff Sessions may have had a third interaction with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, CNN reports.
Jared Kushner is expected to meet with Senate Intelligence Committee staff mid-June, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News.
“Kushner’s meeting would be the first step in an agreement he made with the committee. He’s expected to provide documents and ultimately take questions from the committee’s senators.”
Jack Goldsmith: “Trump does not remotely understand his role, status, and duties as President and Chief Executive, and this failure infects or undermines just about everything he does. It is an amazing state of affairs: A President of the United States who does not at all grasp the Office he occupies, and who thus entirely lacks the proper situation sense, or contextual knowledge, in which a President should exercise judgment or act. Let that sink in, and then imagine all of the decisions a President must make, all that he is responsible for.”
Evan Osnos: “By any normal accounting, the chance of a Presidency ending ahead of schedule is remote. In two hundred and twenty-eight years, only one President has resigned; two have been impeached, though neither was ultimately removed from office; eight have died. But nothing about Trump is normal. Although some of my sources maintained that laws and politics protect the President to a degree that his critics underestimate, others argued that he has already set in motion a process of his undoing. All agree that Trump is unlike his predecessors in ways that intensify his political, legal, and personal risks. He is the first President with no prior experience in government or the military, the first to retain ownership of a business empire, and the oldest person ever to assume the Presidency.”
Aides to President Trump are urging him not to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions despite rifts between the two men, Reuters reports.
“Political and legal advisers inside the White House have told Trump over the past month that firing Sessions would create another political fire storm and make it more difficult to fill key jobs inside his administration, the sources said on the condition of anonymity.”
Said one: “That’s the advice he’s been given. But he might not listen to that advice.”
Rick Klein: “He accused the president and his top aides of lying. He suggested that the president wanted special treatment in exchange for loyalty. He said he thinks he lost his job because of how he handled the Russia investigation.”
“James Comey served notice that if President Donald Trump operates like a bully, there are powerful people who know how to punch back. The ex-FBI director’s powerful, riveting testimony — delivered under oath before the Senate Intelligence Committee — overflowed with headlines and revelations that will resonate for months or longer.”
“Among the big takeaways: In Comey, Trump has made an enemy who knows the levers of Washington power and has already put in motion forces that are beyond the president’s ability to control.”
“Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”
— Former FBI Director James Comey, quoted by the New York Times, referring to President Trump’s suggestion that he may have recorded their conversations.
Former FBI director James Comey “essentially laid out an obstruction of justice case against President Trump and suggested senior leaders in the bureau might have actually contemplated the matter before Trump removed him as director,” the Washington Post reports.
“Comey did not explicitly draw any legal conclusions. Whether justice was obstructed, he said, was a question for recently appointed special counsel Robert Mueller. But he said Trump’s request to terminate the FBI’s investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn left him ‘stunned,’ and senior FBI officials considered it to be of ‘investigative interest.'”
Jeffrey Toobin: “President Trump appears to be guilty of obstruction of justice. That’s the only rational conclusion to be reached if James Comey’s opening statement for his planned testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Thursday, is to be believed. The lurch of the Trump Presidency from one crisis to the next scandal produces a kind of bombshell-induced numbness, but that should not prevent us from appreciating the magnitude of Comey’s statement.”
Jennifer Palmieri: “I know from experience that it’s even more disorienting than it appears. No one in a position of authority at the White House tells you what is happening. No one knows. Your closest colleague could be under investigation and you would not know. You could be under investigation and not know. It can be impossible to stay focused on your job.”
“There will be other collateral damage. In the Clinton White House, we tried hard to isolate the team of lawyers working on impeachment so President Clinton and his staff could continue advancing their policy goals. Yet Congress was consumed with impeachment for months, and it was nearly impossible to get anything done.”
Doug Sosnik: “My lesson from those days: Trump and his advisers are in way over their heads and unprepared for what awaits them.”
Former FBI Director James Comey “said he shared copies of his memos documenting his meetings with President Trump with a friend — an unnamed professor at Columbia Law School — so this person could share the information with a reporter,” the Washington Post reports.
New York Times: “He said he did so with the explicit hope of triggering the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian election interference.”
Dan Balz: “Sessions, of course, was one of Trump’s earliest and most important endorsers and a staunch loyalist throughout the campaign. If one as loyal as Sessions receives no loyalty in return, what will others in the administration think?”
Rick Klein: “Even in the black-or-white, red-or-blue worlds of present-day politics, several things can be true at once about James Comey’s testimony. The conduct Comey ascribes to President Trump may be both technically legal and wholly inappropriate. Trump’s request for loyalty and push for the ‘cloud’ to be lifted are far from normal and are potentially alarming. Yet that doesn’t mean Comey acted perfectly, with his pledge of ‘honest loyalty’ and the now-famous three assurances that Trump himself was not under investigation.”
“Comey’s prepared testimony gives Trump a window for an out, an opportunity to say he did nothing wrong, and simply wanted that word out so he could focus on governing. But Comey has not yet begun to talk: By having his testimony out for all to digest a day early, senators can sharpen their questions and start to pick at some of the more intriguing threads in the timeline he laid out. White House allies are split on how much to either attack or embrace Comey’s testimony. Remember: Comey, who’s been called a ‘nut job’ by the president and been accused of ‘atrocities’ by a White House spokesperson, is a savvy pro in the hot seat. He can lift clouds but he can also unleash new kinds of weather patterns on the president.”
Daily Beast: “But there’s an explanation for at least some of the leaks that’s a little more cunning than the rest—one that might bring some actual resolution. Four current and former law enforcement officials believe prosecutors have been treating Trump and his associates like a criminal network, and subjecting them to an array of time-tested law enforcement tricks.”
“One of those tricks involves floating names of potential targets of the investigation, to try and get potential co-conspirators to turn on one another. Another, called ‘tickling the wire,’ entails strategically leaking information to try and provoke targets under surveillance into saying something dumb, or even incriminating.”
Said one former FBI official: “You want people to freak out, to say, ‘are they talking about me? Is this me? What do they know?’—and you want them to do this in a way that is captured. Now we wait for the cover up.”
Michael Grunwald: “There are still plenty of unanswered questions about Russia—including the usual questions about what the president knew and when he knew it—but what’s shocking is how many questions have already been answered. The scandal has already led to the abrupt firing of Trump’s national security adviser. His attorney general and his son-in-law are also under siege for making false statements about their contacts with Russians; his former campaign manager is in legal jeopardy over his own political and financial ties to Russian operatives. And Trump himself keeps saying and tweeting things that would make any defense lawyer cringe, while doing things in his official capacity that make Vladimir Putin smile. It isn’t clear how much, if any, of this behavior has been criminal, but a lot of it is pretty clearly scandalous.”
“The main unanswered question is whether the Republicans who control Congress will do anything about any of it. So far, their response has mostly amounted to ‘Ha! ha! ha!'”
Politico: “Comey revealed in his written testimony that he’s had nine one-on-one conversations with Trump — ‘three in person and six on the phone.’ Yet he goes into detail about only five of those instances.”
“Senators are sure to ask Comey about the other conversations — their substance, their tone and their timing – to see whether they give a fuller picture of Trump’s posture toward his FBI director in those crucial months.”
“Comey says his last interaction with Trump came on April 11, a month before he was fired. If so, what might have transpired in the intervening weeks that led Trump to ax Comey at the moment he did?”
Mike Allen notes that former FBI Directory James Comey uses a word in his Senate testimony “that I suspect will become famous as the investigation unfolds.”
The President went on to say that if there were some “satellite” associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out, but that he hadn’t done anything wrong and hoped I would find a way to get it out that we weren’t investigating him.
The big question: Who does the Trump think of as “satellites”?
New York Times: How seven Trump associates have been linked to Russia.
Politico: “How long can Trump resist taking to Twitter to bash Comey midhearing? Even his aides can never be sure, and reports suggest Trump is going to be watching Comey’s testimony and prepared to respond.”
“Even if he stays silent, the prospect of a presidential smackdown from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue will hang over the hearing all morning — and possibly become grist for other ongoing investigative efforts.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.