Even most mainstream news organizations have made it clear that the much-sensationalized Trump/Russia dossier that was recklessly published by BuzzFeed in January is little more than a packet of unsubstantiated wild fictions about the president, but there are still those out there who think that – because the FBI put some faith in the dossier and its author, former British spy Christopher Steele – there must be SOMETHING to the allegations. In an interview with The New York Times this week, President Trump addressed that dossier with his own theory about why James Comey and the FBI put so much emphasis on the document early on in his presidency.
From The Times:
Mr. Trump recalled that a little more than two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower on Russian meddling. Mr. Comey afterward pulled Mr. Trump aside and told him about a dossier that had been assembled by a former British spy filled with salacious allegations against the incoming president, including supposed sexual escapades in Moscow. The F.B.I. has not corroborated the most sensational assertions in the dossier.
Trump told reporters that he was suspicious about the point of the private meeting.
“In my opinion,” he said, “he shared it so that I would think he had it out there.”
The reporters asked if Comey was trying to use the dossier as leverage in order to keep his job.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think so. In retrospect.”
As far as the dossier itself is concerned, Trump said he had never been concerned about the contents.
“When he brought it to me, I said this is really made-up junk,” he said. “I didn’t think about any of it. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal.”
The former FBI director gave testimony to Congress about why he felt it necessary to share the contents of the dossier with the president-elect.
“The leadership thought it was important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified,” Comey said. “Among those reasons were: One, we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and two, to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.”
Well, it once again comes down to who you believe. Trump, who maintains that he never had anything to do with Russia, or Comey, who remained antagonistic towards the new president throughout his short tenure in the administration. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle – it usually is – but we still think the president made the right call sending Comey on his merry way.
Comments are closed.