- perform a fictional role in a play, movie, or television production.
Regarding election alterations
BURR: Are you confident that no votes cast in the 2016 presidential election were altered?COMEY: I'm confident. When I left as director I had seen no indication of that whatsoever. BURR: Director Comey, did the president at any time ask you to stop the FBI investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. Elections?COMEY: Not to my understanding, no.BURR: Did any individual working for this administration, including the justice department, ask you to stop the Russian investigation?COMEY: No.
Re: Collusion. Notice Comey did NOT confirm there was collusion between Trump and Russia
BURR: Director, the term we hear most often is collusion. When people are describing possible links between Americans and Russian government entities related to the interference in our election, would you say that it's Normal for foreign governments to reach out to members of an incoming administration?COMEY: Yes.BURR: At what point does the normal contact cross the line into an attempt to recruit agents or influence or spies?COMEY: Difficult to say in the abstract. It depends upon the context, whether there's an effort to keep it covert, what the nature of the request made of the American by the foreign government are. It's a judgment call based on a whole lot of facts.BURR: At what point would that recruitment become a counterintelligence threat to our country?COMEY: Again, difficult to answer in the abstract, but when a foreign power is using especially coercion, or some sort of pressure to try and co-opt an American, especially a government official, to act on its behalf, that's a serious concern to the FBI and at the heart of the FBI's counterintelligence mission.BURR: So if you've got a 36-page document of specific claims that are out there, the FBI would have to for counter intelligence reasons, try to verify anything that might be claimed in there, one, and probably first and foremost, is the counterintelligence concerns that we have about blackmail. Would that be an accurate statement?COMEY: Yes. If the FBI receives a credible allegation that there is some effort to co-opt, coerce, direct, employee covertly an American on behalf of the foreign power, that's the basis on which a counterintelligence investigation is opened.BURR: And when you read the dossier, what was your reaction, given that it was 100% directed at the president-elect?COMEY: Not a question I can answer in open setting, Mr. Chairman.
Re: Comey’s leaks
BURR: Let me go back if I can very briefly to the decision to publicly go out with your results on the email. Was your decision influenced by the attorney general's tarmac meeting with the former president, Bill Clinton?COMEY: Yes. In ultimately conclusive way that was the thing that capped it for me, that I had to do something separately to protect the credibility of the investigation, which meant both the FBI and the justice department.
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WARNER: February 14th, seems strange, you were in a meeting, and your direct superior the attorney general was in that meeting as well, yet the president asked everyone to leave, including the attorney general to leave, before he brought up the matter of general Flynn. What was your impression of that type of action? Have you ever seen anything like that before?COMEY: No. My impression was something big is about to happen. I need to remember every single word that is spoken, and again, I could be wrong, I'm 56 years old, I've been, seen a few things, my sense was the attorney general knew he shouldn't be leaving which was why he was leaving and I don't know Kushner well but I think he picked up on the same thing so I knew something was about to happen that I needed to pay very close attention to.WARNER: I found it very interesting that, that in the memo that you wrote after this February 14th pull-aside, you made clear that you wrote that memo in a way that was unclassified. If you affirmatively made the decision to write a memo that was unclassified, was that because you felt at some point, the facts of that meeting would have to come clean and come clear, and actually be able to be cleared in a way that could be shared with the American people?
Leading? Comey could just have well wrote the memo in an unclassified manner in order to create specific perceptions via the media- in collusion with the Clinton's? Possible.
COMEY: Well, I remember thinking, this is a very disturbing development, really important to our work. I need to document it and preserve it in a way, and this committee gets this but sometimes when things are classified, it tangled them up.
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WARNER: Tens of thousands. Did the president ever ask about any other ongoing investigation?COMEY: No.WARNER: Did he ever ask about you trying to interfere on any other investigation?COMEY: No.
Implication... The President asked him to interfere in the Russian investigation but not in other investigations.. From the testimony there appears nothing definitive suggesting Trump requested anything - Deceptive questioning from Warner. Again.>>>>>>
COMEY: Thank you, Senator Warner. I'm sitting here going through my contacts with him. I had one conversation with the president that was classified where he asked about our, an ongoing intelligence investigation, it was brief and entirely professional.WARNER: He didn't ask to you take any specific action?COMEY: No.WARNER: Unlike what we did vis-à-vis will Flynn and the Russia investigation?COMEY: Correct.
Again it's implied Trump interfered, but, there appears to be no real proof of this>>>>
RISCH: I remember, you talked with us shortly after February 14th, when the "New York Times" wrote an article that suggested that the trump campaign was colluding with the Russians. Do you remember reading that article when it first came out?COMEY: I do, it was about allegedly extensive electronic surveillance in their communications.RISCH: Correct. That upset you to the point where you surveyed the intelligence community to see whether you were missing something in that. Is that correct?COMEY: That's correct. I want to be careful in open setting, but —RISCH: I'm not going to go any further than that, so thank you. In addition to that, after that, you sought out both Republican and Democrat senators to tell them that, hey, I don't know where this is coming from, but this is not the case. This is not factual. Do you recall that?COMEY: Yes.RISCH: Okay. So again, so the American people can understand this, that report by the New York Times was not true. Is that a fair statement?COMEY: In the main, it was not true. And again, all of you know this. Maybe the American people don't. The challenge, and I'm not picking on reporters about writing stories about classified information, is the people talking about it often don't really know what's going on, and going on are not talking about it. We don't call the press to say, hey, you don't that thing wrong about the sensitive topic. We have to leave it there.
Comey verifies that the mockingbird media report was not true- Not True>>>>>>>> Trump did not order or direct Comey to drop any investigation- Admitted by ComeyRISCH: Thank you for that. He did not direct you to let it go?COMEY: Not in his words, no.RISCH: He did not order you to let it go?COMEY: Again, those words are not an order.RISCH: He said, I hope. Now, like me, you probably did hundreds of cases, maybe thousands of cases, charging people with criminal offenses and, of course, you have knowledge of the thousands of cases out there where people have been charged. Do you know of any case where a person has been charged for obstruction of justice or, for that matter, any other criminal offense, where they said or thought they hoped for an outcome?COMEY: I don't know well enough to answer. The reason I keep saying his words is I took it as a direction. >>>>>>Comey paints an image of himself with words
HEINRICH: Fair enough. Told the reporter he never did that. You've testified that the president asked for your loyalty in that dinner. White house denies that. A lot of this comes down to who should we believe. Do you want to say anything as to why we should believe you?COMEY: My mother raised me not to say things like this about myself so I'm not going to. I think people should look at the whole body of my testimony. As I used to say to juries, when I talked about a witness, you can't cherry pick it. You can't say, I like these things he said but on this, he's a ten liar. You have to take it together. I've tried to be open, fair, transparent and accurate. Of significant fact to me is so why did he kick everybody out of the Oval Office? Why would you kick the attorney general, the president, the chief of staff out to talk to me if it was about something else? So that, to me, as an investigator, is a significant fact.
After reading this testimony, it seems to me that Comey may have questionable ties to the Clintons-Especially when one considers his clearing of Hillary.He really hasn’t provided any evidence of collusion between the Trump Whitehouse and the Russians. And he, Comey, comes off as duplicitous.