Former FBI Director James Comey testifies before Congress

Donald Trump won the presidency by promising to restore respect for the law in America. But he’s shown more disrespect for the rule of law than any president in recent history.

He’s attacked his own FBI (“its reputation is in Tatters — worst in History”) and “‘Justice’ Department” for failing to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

President Donald Trump loves Michael Flynn.

His ardor hasn’t faded despite the fact that the biggest scandals engulfing the Trump administration right now trace back to the disgraced former national security adviser, or that their very closeness has at times growing talk of impeachment. If anything, all of that seems to be making Trump love Flynn even more. This is all the more interesting since Thursday, when the Wall Street Journal reported that a Republican operative who claimed to be working on behalf of Flynn was asking around for stolen Clinton emails during the campaign — which smells a little like a plot to collude with Russian hackers.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is now investigating whether President Donald Trump has committed obstruction of justice, the Washington Post reports. This news should shock precisely no one: Mueller’s mandate specifically authorizes him to investigate obstruction of justice allegations arising out of his probe. But the report underscores the seriousness of the obstruction allegations against Trump — and the strength of the evidence already amassed.

In a nutshell, the case against President Trump consists of the following: The President intimated to then-FBI Director James Comey in February that Comey ought to shut down the bureau’s investigation of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. When Comey rebuffed him, President Trump sought to enlist Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats in an effort to stop the Flynn probe.

A congressional committee wants to know if the White House did indeed keep tapes of President Donald Trump’s private conversations with James Comey, the former FBI director who testified in the Senate this week.

The House Intelligence Committee has submitted two letters to the administration related to the Comey revelations surrounding his meetings with Trump: one to the Department of Justice’s special counsel Robert Mueller for Comey’s personal memos, and a second to White House counsel Don McGahn, requesting information on any possible “recordings or memoranda of Comey’s conversations with President Trump.”

At a press conference Friday, President Donald Trump continued to accuse fired FBI Director James Comey of lying about his conversations with Trump in sworn congressional testimony, and he seemed to suggest that he’d be willing to give his own version of events under oath.

But the exchange, with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, was a bit of a muddle, and it’s unclear whether the president intended his answer to come across that way.

When fired FBI Director James Comey appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, one question he had to answer was: Why didn’t you stand up to Donald Trump? Here’s what Comey said when asked why he didn’t say no to his boss when being asked to drop the Russia investigation:

SEN. MARCO RUBIO: Director Comey, the meeting in the oval office where [Trump] made the request about Mike Flynn, was that only time he asked you to hopefully let it go?

Even before former FBI Director James Comey testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, we got a taste of what the storylines would be on right-wing news sites.

In response to Comey’s prepared statement, released a day earlier, the pro-Trump spin was that it exonerated President Donald Trump because Comey told him he wasn’t personally under investigation — something Trump had repeated time and again.

With James Comey’s testimony sucking up all the news oxygen this week, late-night hosts had plenty to work with as they broke the event down on June 8. But since our time on this planet is finite — and getting more finite with every passing day — we’ve picked three of the best moments from last night’s late-night offerings as some of the nation’s most prominent court jesters reacted to the FBI director’s showdown with the Senate.

While The Daily Show host opened his show with a quick reminder for his audience to “acknowledge how batshit crazy this all is,” Noah’s monologue also took pains to point out that Comey’s testimony was neither as vague as Republicans might have wanted nor as damning as Democrats undoubtedly hoped.

On Twitter Friday morning, President Donald Trump accused former FBI Director James Comey of making “false statements and lies” in his congressional testimony (while also claiming that the testimony somehow delivered him “complete vindication”):

It’s nothing new for Trump to accuse his political enemies of lying, but what makes this a particularly serious accusation is that Comey was under oath before Congress. So if he was lying, he was committing perjury. And if found guilty under the general federal perjury statute, Comey could get a prison sentence of up to five years.

Donald Trump understands, better than any politician I’ve ever seen, that the question isn’t whether you’re winning the argument — it’s whether you’re dominating and driving the coverage of the argument. And that is his strategy in responding to former FBI Director James Comey’s searing testimony. Trump means to take back control of the storyline. But he doesn’t intend to win the argument, or even offer a persuasive counterargument or narrative of events. Instead, his strategy is to crowd out coverage of Comey’s arguments and force the media to cover bullshit.

A bit of set-up is useful here. Matthew Yglesias recently wrote a brilliant essay arguing that Donald Trump is a bullshitter, not a liar. Yglesias is using “bullshit” as a technical term, working off Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s seminal book On Bullshit, which distinguishes the liar, who is trying to persuade us of a false truth, from the bullshitter, who cares little for persuasion so long as he is achieving his other ends. As Frankfurt writes:

A hearing convened at 10 am on Thursday on Capitol Hill, on the subject of one of the great crises in America today. President Donald Trump almost certainly missed it, because he was glued to coverage of a different hearing: the testimony in the Senate Intelligence Committee of James Comey, the man Trump fired as FBI director.

The opening remarks that Trump really needed to hear came not from Comey, but from Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-OH), the chair of the congressional Joint Economic Committee, who presided over the hearing on Economic Aspects of the Opioid Crisis. “Drug abuse has become rampant in America and may be the worst the country has experienced,” Tiberi said. “It is devastating families and degrading communities, and undermining parts of the economy.”

The morning after former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:

So exactly was Trump watching when he sent this out?

Twice in his Senate testimony on Thursday, former FBI Director Jim Comey said President Donald Trump’s behavior made him feel “uneasy.”

Specifically, Trump seemed to have no regard for the FBI’s independence from the executive branch. “The reason that Congress created a 10-year term is so that the director is not feeling as if they’re serving at, with political loyalty owed to any particular person,” Comey said. “…That’s why I was uneasy.”

After the public testimony of former FBI Director James Comey on Thursday, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, released a statement. In addition to being riddled with typos, it contained a curious legal argument.

Kasowitz contended that Comey broke the law by leaking memos about his private conversations with the president — what the statement called an “unauthorized disclosure of private information.”

If you read through the transcript of the ousted FBI Director James Comey’s Senate hearing Thursday, one of the most remarkable patterns is Comey reiterating a fear that the president would lie about the details of their interactions.

He says those concerns are what led him to write the now-famous, very detailed memos. (Memo writing was not something he did with President Barack Obama.)

Before President Donald Trump, Senate hearings were usually confined to the dustiest corners of C-SPAN, where only the most dedicated wonks would bother to find them.

But 139 days into one of the most turbulent presidencies in American history, the sight of an aggressively stone-faced man giving testimony at 10 am on a Thursday aired across news channels to millions of viewers and snarky tweets. The days leading up to the hearing were marked by breathless speculation as to who would show up, whether or not the president would join in the live-tweeting, and which moment might be the one to blow everything wide open.

Donald Trump broke a long (for him) Twitter drought on Friday morning, returning from more than a day of tweet-silence to call former FBI Director James Comey a “leaker” — and to quite possibly accuse him of perjury.

Trump also echoed his lawyer — and conservative media — in claiming “complete vindication” from Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday morning.

It was almost the end of James Comey’s nearly three-hour public testimony when Sen. John Cornyn trapped him into a Republican talking point.

“If you’re trying to make an investigation go away, is firing an FBI director a good way to make that happen?” Cornyn asked Comey, who Trump had fired in May.

For the most part, former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Thursday has focused on President Donald Trump.

That makes sense: It is, after all, Trump who allegedly asked Comey to close the FBI investigation into former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn. And it was Trump who pressured him to disclose information publicly about the ongoing investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the interest of lifting the “cloud” hanging over the Trump presidency.

James Comey testified to Congress in a public session of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, June 8, at 10 am Eastern. It was his first time speaking on the matter publicly since he left his position.

Comey’s prepared testimony was released the day before he testified. In it, he recounts how President Donald Trump requested a pledge of loyalty from him at a one-on-one dinner between the president and the then-FBI director. He also describes an instance when the president dismissed his other advisers so he could be alone with Comey to bring up the investigation into former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and ask Comey to “let this go.”

One clear message shone through like a flash of lightning from James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday morning: Hillary Clinton was right about Donald Trump.

His testimony painted a picture of a president who neither understands nor respects the norms and values that underlie the constitutional order, lacks the information necessary to do his job properly, and doesn’t have the humility to seek or accept appropriate advice about how to get better. Comey knew it from his very first meeting with Trump.

Former FBI Director James Comey’s prepared testimony about President Donald Trump — delivered on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee — is gripping.

But it’s not just gripping because of its contents, or its allegations that President Trump asked Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn or demanded what amounts to a loyalty oath. It’s gripping because of its style.

Republicans and Democrats are already fighting over whether Thursday’s historic hearing with ousted FBI Director James Comey was a bad day for President Donald Trump (because Comey directly accused him of lying) or a good one (because Comey repeatedly conceded that Trump wasn’t personally under investigation).

But there was one undisputed winner from the hearing, even if his name was never explicitly mentioned: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Former FBI Director James Comey spent three hours under oath Thursday explaining his private interactions with Donald Trump in the months before he was fired. While he declined to talk about details involving the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, he did not hold back when it came to giving information about his tense and uncomfortable relationship with President Trump.

During the hearing, Comey accused Trump of lying, of making disturbing and shocking requests, and felt that Trump was trying to influence the FBI’s investigation of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. He did not, however, go as far as saying that Trump had tried to obstruct the investigation. Comey’s comments displayed a clear effort to defend himself — and the FBI — against potential accusations that the agency acted out of line.

James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday was an extraordinary public critique of President Donald Trump’s conduct in office and character as a whole.

“I knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself, but to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function,” Comey said.