Former FBI director James Comey has delivered his testimony before the United States Congress, backing up his earlier written testimony, making the truly explosive allegation that Donald Trump is a liar. Shocking, yes.
But it’s perhaps a little unexpected that Comey would go so far as to repeatedly and explicitly brand Trump a liar. His three hour testimony contained allegations that Trump had deliberately lied to smear Comey and the FBIs reputation, and that Comey had documented every interaction he had with the president because he was concerned that Trump might lie about it in future.
Speaking about Trump’s alleged ‘defamation’, Comey apologised to the FBI workforce:
The administration chose to defame me and, more importantly, the FBI by saying that the organisation was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader.”Those were lies, plain and simple, and I’m so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them, and I’m so sorry the American people were told them.
He also weighed in on the allegations that Russia interfered with the U.S. election. “There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever,” Comey said. “The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts.”
During questioning, he told senators that he believed that his dismissal was directly linked to the Russia investigation. “It’s my judgment that I was fired because of the Russia investigation,” Comey told the senators. “I was fired in some way to change, or the endeavour was to change, the way the Russia investigation was being conducted.”
Comey went on quite a spiel about Russia, arguing that rejecting foreign interference in elections should be a bipartisan issue:
The reason this is such a big deal is we have this big, messy, wonderful country where we fight with each other all the time, but nobody tells us what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for except other Americans. And that’s wonderful and often painful. But we’re talking about a foreign government using technical intrusion and lots of other methods tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal.And people need to recognise it. It’s not about Republicans or Democrats. They’re coming after America, which I hope we all love equally. They want to undermine our credibility in the face of the world. They think that this great experiment of ours is a threat to them, and so they’re going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as possible.
Wild stuff, folks.
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: Getty Images.
