[Daily Caller] The New York Times reported on Tuesday that President Trump allegedly asked former FBI Director James Comey to shut down the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The source of the allegation is a memorandum, revealed by an anonymous source, allegedly prepared by Comey regarding a meeting in the Oval Office the day after Flynn was forced to resign for misleading the Vice-President.While the headline is sensational, The New York Times’s report is self-contradictory at times, conflicts with statements made on-the-record and under oath, overhypes the substance of the memorandum, and is irreconcilable with other information in the public record.
First, the report concedes that the Times has not "viewed a copy of the memo," despite the fact that the Times says memo itself "is unclassified." If the memo is unclassified, then that raises several questions. Why did the Times not press the source for a copy of the memo? Why did the Times not seek a copy through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) before publishing? If it was truly unclassified, then the Times stood a decent chance of having the memo released.
Second, if Times’s story is true and what President Trump did amounted to obstruction of justice, then Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe likely committed perjury. Before Comey was fired, McCabe was the Deputy Director of the FBI, one of four "senior staff" positions and also the Bureau’s second-in-command. The Times report alleges that Comey "shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates," which means that McCabe knew about the memo on May 11 when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about the Russia investigation. During his testimony, Senator Marco Rubio and McCabe (who was under oath) had the following exchange: