Donald Trump’s Wednesday visit with the New York Times is the interview that keeps on giving … insanity. In addition to threatening Special Counsel Robert Mueller and tossing Jefferson Sessions under a bus followed by a steam roller, Trump took time out for a special heave of paranoia about former FBI Director James Comey and everyone connected to Comey, the FBI, or simply Comey-adjacent.
In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it.
How did Comey “leverage” this dossier? He … told Trump it existed.
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.
Comey tried to tell Trump about something that most people would find embarrassing discreetly, rather than making it part of the main discussion. How did Trump take this?
In the interview, Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president.
Trump’s reaction to the information says far, far more about Donald Trump than it does about James Comey.
“In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Mr. Trump said. As leverage? “Yeah, I think so,” Mr. Trump said. “In retrospect.”
Why would anyone try to do a kindness for someone else? Because they were letting them know they had an edge. That’s Trump’s kind of thinking.
Trump also dismissed Comey’s testimony about the meeting where Trump asked him to halt the investigation into Michael Flynn.
“I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?”
Actually, no one has identified a lie by Comey in his testimony. The idea that he lied remains a charge coming only from Trump.
He expressed no second thoughts about firing Mr. Comey, saying, “I did a great thing for the American people.”
Especially for that guy who Comey was investigating for betraying the America people and colluding with the Russian government to affect the outcome of the election. Who was that again?
When it comes to the dossier itself, Trump was unimpressed.
The president dismissed the assertions in the dossier: “When he brought it to me, I said this is really made-up junk. I didn’t think about any of it. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal.”
However, since the day Comey made Trump aware of Steele’s assembled documents, points of the work have been verified. And not just once. It’s something the FBI continues to take seriously and which has been supported by multiple sources. It supports a timeline of events during the campaign.
And as for the most disgusting claims in Steele’s dossier, those happened on a trip beginning on November 9, 2013.
Trump’s perverted conduct in Moscow including hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms.
That would be this weekend …