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Analysis: Three Big Takeaways from Bret Baier's Thorough Grilling of James Comey
 [Townhall] Fox News anchor Bret Baier (a colleague with whom I'm friendly) conducted a tour de force interview with fired FBI Director James Comey on Special Report last night, grilling Comey at length about a series of decisions and statements he made in connection to the Clinton email and Russia collusion investigations. Full video is available here and here. There was an enormous amount of substance tackled during the discussion, but a few exchanges jump out at me. (1) One back-and-forth was so striking that I tweeted about it during the program:"What do you mean?" asks an incredulous Baier when Comey says he can't say for sure that the DNC and Clinton campaign funded the salacious dossier. Comey clarifies that he's only heard media reports to that effect, but can't be certain they're true. How is that possible? First of all, the provenance of that file, and who paid for it, has been an established fact for months. Comey was in an unique position to know basically everything about the dossier, upon which he at least partially relied (his answer on this point struck me as slippery and conflicts with other information) to secure surveillance on a former Trump campaign associate. He claims he knew it was furnished by people opposed to Donald Trump, but never knew their specific identities. Really? Either that's false or he was strangely and perhaps deliberately under-informed about key details behind a crucial oppo-research file that he exploited to achieve important investigative ends. As for his assertion that Steele's anti-Trump work was originally paid for by Republicans, this is a Democratic talking point that has long been debunked, as Baier notes. Conservative figures did employ Fusion GPS for a time to gather research on Trump, but they did not fund Steele or his dossier. As Byron York says, "given its importance in Trump-Russia probe and his own relationship with the president, James Comey's ignorance of some basic facts about the dossier is stunning." Posted by: Besoeker 2018-04-28 |
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