Donald Trump closed out last week by rumbling back into his
battle against James Comey,
who was FBI director until POTUS fired him. In the
morning, he celebrated Comey's Senate testimony as a "complete
vindication" on Twitter. In the afternoon, Trump flat-out called him a
liar — in the Rose Garden, no less.
When a reporter asked Trump if he
would testify about his version of events "under oath" with the
Justice Department's special counsel in the Russia probe, Robert
Mueller, the president said, "One hundred percent." And
Trump elaborated, "I would be glad to tell him exactly what I just told
you."
Well, that's interesting.
A decade ago, my lawyers
questioned Trump under oath during a deposition in a libel case he filed
against me for a biography I wrote, "TrumpNation." (Trump lost the
case in 2011.) Trump had to acknowledge 30 times during that deposition that he
had lied over the years about a wide range of issues: his ownership stake in a
large Manhattan real estate development, the cost of a membership to one of his
golf clubs, the size of the Trump Organization, his wealth, the rate for his
speaking appearances, how many condos he had sold, the debt he owed, and whether
he borrowed money from his family to stave off personal bankruptcy.
A loose relationship with the
facts has also plagued Team Trump in the White House. Kellyanne Conway, Sean
Spicer, Stephen Miller, Mick Mulvaney, Reince Preibus and, of course, Michael
Flynn, have all been caught peddling blather or lies in the course of carrying
out their civic duties.
Trump's own lawyer, Marc Kasowitz,
has had problems getting his facts straight, too. (Kasowitz represented Trump
when the president sued me in 2006.) In a press release littered with errors
and a misspelled title for Trump ("Predisent"), Kasowitz last week
accused Comey of trying to undermine the White House by leaking information
about his conversations with the president.
Kasowitz also said that Comey lied
when testifying that he shared information about his conversations with the
president only after Trump tweeted that he might have made tapes of the same
conversations. Yet, Kasowitz claimed, the New York Times had published an
article about the Comey-Trump conversations prior to Trump's tweet. Kasowitz
was wrong, however. The Times' first article about the conversations appeared
on May 16, four days after Trump tweeted: "James Comey better hope that
there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the
press! 8:26 AM - 12 May 2017"
I don't think any tapes exist.
Trump told me and other reporters over the years that he had a taping system in
his Trump Tower office that he used to record journalists meeting with him. But
when he testified under oath in the deposition for his suit against me, Trump
acknowledged that he was "not equipped to tape-record."
There's another odd aspect to all
of the back-and-forth about Trump's multiple conversations with Comey: The
president apparently never inquired about the substance of the FBI's Russia investigation.
That has prompted a former law enforcement professional and others to say that
it reveals a troubling disregard for national security on the president's part
(which it does). Others noted that it also suggests that Trump may have already
known quite a bit about the Russian affair — and therefore had few
questions for Comey.
"The innocent ask a multitude
of questions about what the detectives know, or why the cops might think X or Y
or whether Z happened to the victim," former police reporter and creator
of "The Wire," David Simon, noted in a pair of Twitter posts.
"The guilty forget to inquire. They know."
House Speaker Paul Ryan said that
Trump deserves a pass for strong-arming Comey because "the president is
new at this" in Washington and he's "learning as he goes." But
positioning the nation's capital as a complicated place for unwary newcomers
doesn't hold much water for the president, who turns 71 in two days. In fact,
Trump is not new at this at all — he's been directly lobbying and strong-arming
regulators and law enforcement officials for decades.
Trump is the man, after all, who
coined the term "truthful hyperbole" as a euphemism for lying in his
1987 non-fiction work of fiction, "The Art of the Deal." Thirty years
later, he's still up to his old tricks.
The difference now, of course, is
that Trump is president. And in James Comey he's collided with a seasoned, wily
law enforcement official who opened the investigative door for Robert Mueller
and cleared a path for him to bring the full force of the law to bear on the
White House.
"I can definitively say the
president is not a liar," Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House
spokeswoman, said on Friday in response to a question about whether it is Trump
or Comey who is lying.
But now that the president himself
has invited the broader Russia probe and the Justice Department into the Oval
Office we won't have to take Sanders' word for it — Mueller is going to help
answer the question.
Bloomberg View
Timothy O'Brien is the executive
editor of Bloomberg Gadfly and Bloomberg View. He has been an editor and writer
for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine.
His books include "TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald."
RELATED ARTICLES:
No comments:
Post a Comment