Time to recap: the tongue-lashing and colorful language came fast and furious this week on Capitol Hill. Between the tweets from President Trump and the baby bombshells dropped by former FBI Director James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee and the lawmakers themselves leaving a breadcrumb trail of bon mots, there’s a lot to digest.
Let’s start with the president himself, tweeting this morning that, thanks to Comey’s grilling, the Commander-in-Chief is completely vindicated in the Russian-Trump Team probe, if he does say so himself:
“Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication…and WOW, Comey is a leaker!”
Burn Down Trump’s House
And yes, it’s been a very leaky week, in the nation’s capital and across the country. While Trump was going after Comey for leaking, a federal judge denied bail for the this month’s most famous leaker of all, a 25-year-old government contractor with the very unreal name of Reality Winner. During her court hearing on Thursday, government prosecutors provided evidence taken from Winner’s home in Georgia, including notes she had written saying she wanted to “burn the White House down” and move to Nepal. For allegedly sharing NSA documents with The Intercept news site, Winner was indicted by a federal grand jury on one count of “willful retention and transmission of national defense information.” She pleaded not guilty, but not before igniting a media storm with her incendiary musings.
Lordy, Just lordy
In his testimony before senators on Thursday, a must-watch event that seemingly had half the nation riveted to TV screens from the edge of their barstools, Comey hatched a number of linguistic golden eggs. None, though, had quite the entertainment value of this one: “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” the former FBI chief said when he was being questioned about his surreal one-on-one meeting with Trump. Since Comey and the president have diametrically opposed recollections of what transpired during that and other interactions, Comey was essentially telling the panel that he’d be thrilled if the president had been covertly recording their conversations.
Lies, Just Lies
As Vox pointed out, Comey explained how he wrote down detailed memos immediately following each chat he had with the president just in case Trump would later, um, have trouble remembering what exactly had happened. And at five different points in his testimony on Thursday, Vox writes, Comey “tactfully, without a hint of smugness, either directly or indirectly said that Trump did lie, might have lied, or feared that he would have lied.”
Here’s the best of the bunch from Comey: “And although the law required no reason at all to fire an FBI director, the administration then chose to defame me and, more importantly, the FBI by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple. And I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them, and I’m so sorry that the American people were told them.”
Kamala Harris Keeps on Keepin’ On
It was a busy and barb-filled week for California’s junior senator, the firebrand former prosecutor Kamala Harris. During a hearing Wednesday, sparks flew after the Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Sen. Richard Burr, admonished Harris for being disrespectful as she pressed top intelligence chiefs testifying before the panel. At the time, Harris was questioning Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, asking him if he would send a letter to Special Counsel Robert Mueller giving him complete independence in his probe into possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Russians. The exchange was tense, with Harris interrupting Rosenstein as he started to say there wasn’t enough time to explain the answer. When she asked for a yes or no answer, he demurred, and she said, “either you are willing to do that or not.”
