Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at a White House press conference Wednesday afternoon that former FBI Director James Comey’s decision to hold a July 5 press conference about Hillary Clinton’s email case without consulting Attorney General Loretta Lynch was an “atrocity” against Department of Justice chain-of-command principles. Here’s the transcript, in which Sanders refers to remarks Comey made during a May 3 appearance before a Senate committee:
I think one of the big catalysts we saw was, last week on Wednesday, director Comey made a pretty startling revelation that he had essentially taken a stick of dynamite and thrown it into the Department of Justice by going around the chain of command when he decided to take steps without talking to the attorney general or the deputy attorney general when holding a press conference and telling them he would not let them know what he was going to say. And that is simply not allowed.
These comments echoed a memo justifying Comey’s removal that was written by new Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and Sanders would later refer to Comey having committed “atrocities in circumventing the chain of command in the Department of Justice” and having lost the trust of “rank-and-file” FBI agents.
So it’s now the Trump administration position that Comey’s July failure to consult with Loretta Lynch about the Hillary Clinton email case was a fireable offense. But Comey specifically said that the reason he didn’t consult Lynch at the time was that she’d created the appearance of impropriety by meeting with Bill Clinton at a Phoenix airport in June. And one other person who said Lynch could not be trusted to be impartial on the matter was Donald Trump, who at the time described the Lynch–Bill Clinton meeting as “terrible,” “horrible,” and “something that you don’t do from an ethical standpoint.” He also suggested that Hillary herself was involved in arranging it:
In October, after Comey disclosed that the FBI had reopened the Clinton email case, Trump said he believed Bill Clinton’s meeting with Lynch had in fact been illegal and that Hillary Clinton had bribed Lynch into exonerating her in the email case by offering her another term as attorney general. He said Lynch’s meeting with Clinton had created “ripples within the FBI” and that Comey “finally did what was right” by announcing the reopening.
To summarize the Trump stance on this issue, then:
- Hillary Clinton was personally involved in an effort to bribe Loretta Lynch into not putting her in jail.
- Bill Clinton’s meeting with Lynch, at which Trump believes the email case was discussed, was unethical and illegal.
- Lynch’s meeting with Bill Clinton damaged FBI morale.
- When James Comey acted on his belief that Lynch could not impartially supervise the email case, he committed an explosive atrocity that also damaged FBI morale and justifies him being fired 10 months later.
Makes sense to me! [Jumps off cliff into ocean.]
