Republicans Now Believe James Comey Used the Pee Tape to Set a Trap for Trump

[brooklynite]

New York Magazine:

ormer FBI Director James Comey has been telling the world about his harrowing encounters with President Trump, who repeatedly demanded his personal loyalty, implored him to stop investigating Michael Flynn, and then dispatched his personal bodyguard to fire him when he failed to comply. But what if we have the story backwards? What if Trump, an innocent family business operator, naïve to the ways of Washington, had been accosted by a scheming, predatory deep state operator? And what if Comey’s firing was a defensive measure against his nefarious trap? This is the scenario Trump’s defenders now envision, and have laid out in columns by The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.

Hemingway proposes a simple account of Comey’s interactions with Trump: The FBI director was setting up the president by laying a pretext for a media ambush. “Newly released memos written by former FBI director James Comey indicate that an early 2017 briefing for then-President-elect Donald Trump about the contents of an infamous dossier was held so it could be leaked to media outlets eager to report on the dossier’s allegations,” she writes, faux-authoritatively.

Hemingway’s theory is that CNN had the Steele dossier, and could not cover it unless it had a news hook to do so. Comey’s meeting was designed to be the hook. He would tell Trump about the dossier, and then leak the fact that he told Trump to the news media, which “provided them the very news hook they sought and needed” to report on the dossier.

If you read the CNN report on the dossier that Hemingway describes, though, literally the first sentence describes the fact that President Obama was briefed on the dossier before Trump was told about it: “Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.” And then, if you go a few paragraphs down in the CNN story, you learn that the dossier’s allegations were also “mentioned in classified briefings for congressional leaders last year.”

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. Fuck em, they also think Putin is a good guy

[Iliyah]

10. They also think "forcing a women regarding sex" is a form of

multiplying.

[Eliot Rosewater]

11. And if she is uncooperative she is to be imprisoned or executed

We dont know what the punishment for women will be when they exercise their rights to their bodies, but there will be a severe punishment REGARDLESS of what happens in November if a SC justice is appointed before 2020

But, you know, emails and nose holding more important.

[Mike Nelson]

2. Huh...

..."an innocent family business operator"?

[W_HAMILTON]

3. Funny, I thought virtually everyone in the media -- including CNN --

didn't even mention the dossier until Buzzfeed or whoever it was published it online for all to see, even though all these news organizations had copies of it for weeks (months?)......

[unblock]

4. "cnn had the steele dossier, and could not cover it unless it had a news hook"???? rofl!!

yeah, the same msm that grabbed illegally obtained emails and gleefully published john podesta's risotto tips decided they couldn't publish the steele dossier, a key document about which tons of news stories have been written always, and detailing how a president of the united states could be subject to blackmail, *that* they couldn't publish without...

... a news hook???

[Arkansas Granny]

5. "What if?" That sounds like an excuse my kids would say when they were in trouble.

[mitch96]

6. I hope Comey wore a wire....

And wrote his notes from the recording...... and then gave it to Mueller. Can't use it in court but it would be damming proof... HA!

M

[emulatorloo]

7. Hard to say what Republicans actually believe, because they are disingenuous assholes

[Orsino]

8. What Republicans say is unlikely to match what they believe.

Excuses for Trump are only going to get more convoluted in the coming months.

[Hugin]

9. Wait! Didn't Buzzfeed or someplace already have the Dossier?

And the Pee Tapes had already run down the legs of the Twitterverse?

[mr_lebowski]

12. So ... 2 simple questions ...

1) Did the 'media ambush' actually HAPPEN i.e. did 'news reporting' on the dossier begin in the media for the first time directly after Comey met with Trump and informed him about it's existence, and
2) Were the very first stories re: the Dossier (and the pee-stuff) introduced to the public using the 'hook' of 'FBI Director Meets with President to Discuss Secret Dossier'?

My recollection is that neither of those is the case, but I'm SUUUURE that if I could be arsed to read this article I'd find that Hemingway painstakingly detailed the ACTUAL EVIDENCE to back-up her little 'conspiracy theory', based on the actual behavior of the media directly the Comey/Trump meeting. I'm sure she's got a links and videos at her disposal to prove the media never mentioned the dossier until RIGHT after the Comey meeting with Cheetoh, and then it being introduced under the auspices of Comey briefing him about it.

Of course she's got that, and she spelled out her evidence, for us to read/watch, right?

BTW the idea that the media wouldn't report on the dossier if they had it in their hands UNTIL the FBI director told Dump about them in an ostensibly private meeting ... is LAUGHABLE. The Ritz Hookers alone was WAY MORE than enough of a 'news hook', they wouldn't have needed, like, confirmation that Dump been briefed on the Dossier ... before reporting on a story like that.

The whole stupid thing makes ZERO sense.

[rurallib]

13. Next: Comes and McCabe were disguised as prostitutes in Moscow

who then forced themselves intoTrump's room to pee on his bed.
How could they treat an innocent billionaire like this?


for the humor impaired

[haele]

14. You can't be trapped into perjury if you didn't do anything wrong.

If he had left Moscow when he said he did, no problem, right?

Rich people who are all concerned about elaborate conspiracies to cause them to seem to be linked to criminal gangs or wrong-doing are generally guilty - it's like they're both surprised and pissed that their money wasn't a substitute for either brains or moral rectitude.

Haele