‘He should be ashamed of himself!’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump clapped back at former FBI Director James Comey‘s claim that a damning report by the Department of Justice’s inspector general had exonerated him.
The report, released Thursday, said Comey had violated FBI policy and his own employment agreement repeatedly when he purloined classified memos of his meetings with the president and shared them with a friend at Columbia University who then leaked them to The New York Times.
Trump’s firing of Comey in May 2017—coinciding with the leaking of the memos—helped trigger the two-year, $30-some-million Mueller investigation into Russian collusion, which earlier this year concluded that Trump had not conspired with the Kremlin.
Perhaps never in the history of our Country has someone been more thoroughly disgraced and excoriated than James Comey in the just released Inspector General’s Report. He should be ashamed of himself!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2019
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham echoed the president in her official statement, saying Comey “disgraced himself and his office to further a personal political agenda,” Fox News reported.
The report stopped short of saying Comey had criminally leaked classified information and declined to recommend charges against him, but many speculate that an ongoing DOJ investigation by special prosecutor John Durham is the most likely avenue for holding accountable Comey and a rogue’s gallery of corrupt, partisan subordinates who ran the agency during the Obama administration.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been working closely with Durham on his case and has recently relayed information after closing his own investigations into figures like ex-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok.
After falsely claiming on Twitter that the report cleared his name—which some in the media seemed to repeat without examining the actual report—Comey also took a swipe at Trump.
And to all those who’ve spent two years talking about me “going to jail” or being a “liar and a leaker”—ask yourselves why you still trust people who gave you bad info for so long, including the president.
— James Comey (@Comey) August 29, 2019
Many other Republican leaders in Congress and elsewhere responded to the report though indicating that the release may be just the beginning of Comey’s troubles.
This is the first of what I expect will be several more ugly and damning rebukes of senior DOJ and FBI officials regarding their actions and biases toward the Trump campaign of 2016.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) August 29, 2019