James Comey was summoned up on Capitol Hill Wednesday to face the Senate Judiciary Committee. Lindsey Graham had some sharply pointed questions for the former FBI Director but Ted Cruz was the one who really sharpened the knives, asking the super tough questions Americans are demanding answers to. Cruz tried to verbally stab the smirking rat in the heart like he wanted to nail him to the wall.
James Comey attacked by the Senate
Formerly the top man at the Federal Bureau of Instigation, James Comey was dragged in front of a Senate committee to do some serious explaining. The order to appear advised him they wanted to grill him over his conduct, and the conduct of the officials working under his direction about Obamagate. Or, as it’s officially called, “Crossfire Hurricane.” They’re concerned about the entire investigation of “the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia,” which morphed into Robert Mueller’s grand inquisition before Trump was eventually exonerated, and almost impeached for it anyway. The chairman, Lindsey Graham, got a really disturbing letter about it from DNI John Ratcliffe yesterday.
On September 7, 2016, the committee just learned, “U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding ‘U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.'” In other words the CIA wanted the FBI to start a criminal investigation of Hillary’s election meddling. The FBI ignored it. He doesn’t remember it at all. He doesn’t remember anything.
“You don’t remember getting an investigatory lead from the intelligence community?” Senator Graham inquired. “That doesn’t ring any bells with me,” was the only reply Comey could come up with. “Well, that’s a pretty stunning thing that it didn’t ring a bell, but it did come to you,” Graham scolded. As director of the FBI, the smirking witness “was ultimately responsible for overseeing Crossfire Hurricane until he was fired by President Donald Trump in 2017.”
Sen. Ted Cruz to Comey:
“This has done severe damage to the professionals and the honorable men and women at the FBI because law enforcement should not be used a political weapon. That is the legacy you’ve left.”
pic.twitter.com/E5Hu7OEwKf— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 30, 2020
Highly inappropriate behavior
The hearing got warmed up by questioning from Iowa Senator Charles Grassley. He wanted to know “Did you ever speak with President Obama or Vice President Biden about any aspect of Crossfire Hurricane. If so, what did you discuss?” Comey couldn’t remember “any discussion,” but he did recall “sometime in the summer of 2016, I think August, during a meeting in the Situation Room, I told the president that the FBI was endeavoring to understand whether any Americans were working with the Russian effort to attack the election. I didn’t talk about any names, but I believe I alerted him to the general nature of the work.” Grassley wanted to know about his suggestion to Joe Biden to use the Logan Act, as disclosed by recently declassified notes. At first he ducked then later denied it ever happened because if he did do that, “it would have been ‘highly inappropriate.'”
Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, was visibly angry, “rebuking” Comey for his inability to answer any questions. “with all due respect, you don’t seem to know anything about an investigation that you ran.” Regarding the way he denied knowing anything about Hillary’s evil plot to rig the election, Lee turned purple. “How can you as a private citizen now come to us, and in your capacity as former FBI director show up and then speculate freely regarding any alleged ties between President Putin and President Trump when you don’t seem to know anything about this investigation that you ran?” He answered that he could see Russian collusion with his own eyes. “That’s how it struck me watching the president in Helsinki take Putin’s side against his Intelligence Committee, and things like that.” So there you have the basis for the impeachment circus.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was the one to light the fuse on the commercial grade fireworks aimed at the witness stand. Cruz slammed Comey for “corruption and deliberately targeting the Trump campaign.” The man who made sure Hillary got her get out of jail free card had just declared that “the FBI had ‘overall’ acted in a ‘honest, competent, and independent way,'” which totally cheesed off Cruz.
Directly to the lies
“Mr. Comey, let’s go directly to lies. The inspector general report concluded that Mr. Clinesmith, an attorney who worked for you in the FBI, deliberately altered an email. He had emailed the CIA to ask if Carter Page was a source. The CIA came back and said yes, he was a source, and Mr. Clinesmith—your lawyer—altered that email to add the words ‘not a source’ to make the email say precisely the opposite of what the CIA said. That fraudulent document was then used as a basis for a fraudulent submission to the FISA court.
You believe that is honest and competent, Mr. Comey? This investigation of the president was corrupt. The FBI and the Department of Justice were politicized and weaponized, and, in my opinion, there are only two possibilities: that you were deliberately corrupt or woefully incompetent—and I don’t believe you were incompetent,” Cruz thundered.
“This has done severe damage to the professionals and the honorable men and women at the FBI because law enforcement should not be used as a political weapon, and that is the legacy you’ve left.” Before he could slink off back to his lair, Comey had to reject the accusation leveled by Louisiana’s John Kennedy that he went “rogue” in dispatching agents to interview then-White House national security adviser Michael Flynn. Sally Yates is lying, he insists. She may be mad that he acted on his own authority but that’s what authority is all about. Tough. “She understood my explanation afterwards as to why I used my authority, which I had, to do it without coordinating.” He did admit in a long forgotten interview, that he took advantage of the chaos in the early days of Trump’s administration to pull off the frame up job. “I sent them. Something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized administration.”