wear and tear, i mean, adam goldman has a story a couple of days ago about andy mccabe s legal fate still dangling in the air. jim comey today, his day, whatever he had planned, i m sure was altered by this ig report. there s an ongoing ig investigation and another one out of the u.s. attorney s office, i think out of connecticut, into the origins of the russian investigation. there are still there s still a long tale to all of the attacks and smears and calls for politically motivated investigations by donald trump. what does that look like? what are we not seeing? what does that look like behind the scenes? it looks bad and it s really true, perhaps as ashley said for political reasons n. a sense the war is over with the delivery of the mueller report but trump wants to keep fighting for political reasons, and because it s expedient to have certain enemies and it s true, as long as this goes on, if mccabe is indicted, comey might be a
potentially through 2020. if it turns out to be a good rally line f. it turns out to rouse his base, something maybe going negative on immigration and he can return to comey. harry litman, i want to step back for a minute and look at the sweep of history, of what we need. the first 22 months of the he trump presidency did focus, almost exclusively here at least, on this question of collusion with russia and on the president s effort to obstruct the information that robert mueller was conducting. hutch of that was put in motion by what we learned from jim comey s memos? when the ministry is totaled, how big will it be? i think it s a moving force and consider the criticism coming from the white house what might have happened, and it s very plausible if these memos had not seen the light of day, if comey left them in the bowels
you just to sort of explain to our readers this practice is taking contemporaneous memos. i know it s standard inside the federal government, particularly inside law enforcement, but you and colleagues have reported on contemporaneous memos taken by don mcgahn and former chief of staff john kelly around jared and ivanka s security clearances. there s been the reporting obviously of jim comey s memos, which tell an extraordinary story in which the country was gripped by for two years. andy mccabe was known to have taken memos. is there in your view or from your perch, is there more memo taking? is there more salacious material than memos being taken during the trump presidency? i would suspect others have taken memos too. i think we saw a good sample of them with the mueller investigation, you know, but we can t be sure. i mean, there could be people keeping private diaries as well, which would be interesting.
hope this, i took it as this is what he wants me to do. i didn t obey that, but that s the way i took it. inspector general report released he did find comey violated fbi policy by sharing his memos with a personal lawyer. the defining our friend matt miller, doj spokesman and frequent critic of comey described this way, quote, the ig basically faulted comey for speeding on his way to say a fire was coming. but the president and his campaign have come out swinging today, attacking comey with the usual smears. in fact trump falsely accused comey of leaking classified information on at least ten occasions. comey, by the way, lied and leaked and also leaked classified information. then you see the lying and you see the leaking and you see comey lie to congress, nothing happens. you see him leaking, nothing happens. and this is leaking classified
of the fbi, as hoar wits says he should have. you see how they re fighting tooth and nail to keep anything from coming out. if this hadn t emerged to the american people the whole story line of collusion excuse me, obstruction might not have come out. it might have, but that s the real point. and next to that, sort of as matt miller said, the infraction that horowitz railed against today seemed very secondary. paul butler, i want to get you on the record, i think if you re in the middle you see the ig coming down and saying that jim comey s behavior violated fbi policies and i think he also writes he violates his employment agreement but if you take harry s response and adam goldman s response, there was no intentional leaking or release of classified information, it would seem that on balance, the public benefit and protection to the institutions of learning what donald trump is doing,