Jim Trusty: Comey Had Special Employee for Sole Purpose of Leaking Things to the NYT He Shouldn’t Have Possessed

Collins: “I do want to bring in someone for a comment tonight, a former Justice Department prosecutor who also previously represented President Trump in his classified documents case. Jim Trusty is here. And Jim, obviously, you were a former prosecutor, for a long time, in the Department of Justice. Do you believe this decision to charge James Comey was reached independently of what the President has so clearly conveyed he wanted to happen here?”
TRUSTY: “Well, probably. I mean, you do have a grand jury that indicted. They carefully considered the case. They actually shaved it down to an area that makes a lot of sense. You know, nobody’s actually talking about the specifics of his false statement. But this was a director of the FBI who had a special employee designed for one purpose: to leak things to The New York Times. Now, when he was pressed in Congress on whether or not he had leaked something, he had authorized the leak of a memo he retained wrongfully at his house, he said, ‘No, that’s not my recollection.’ They challenged him about McCabe, another guy who had referrals to the Inspector General for lying, and Comey said, ‘That’s not my recollection.’ So, in a weird way, through all this chaos, through all this kind of political interest of what’s going on behind closed doors, who knew what, at the end of the day, the indictment that’s left is actually pretty simple. He either lied about leaking to The New York Times in a tantrum because he was getting fired, or he didn’t. And I don’t think it’s going to lend itself to the easy dismissals that some of your other folks have been saying they’re going to get.”
Collins: I believe it was — it was Wall Street Journal. But here’s the reason that everyone’s raised this question, is basically Ted Cruz had questioned him at this hearing five years ago, and said, ‘You’re saying one thing, your deputy is saying another, in terms of what you authorized to be leaked to the media and leaked to reporters.’ And he was saying his recollection was right. And then Andy McCabe testified to an inspector general that basically he told Comey after the fact that he had — he had released that information to a reporter. And so, I think that is really the question here, in terms of that. But also just the overtly — you know, the overt pressure campaign coming out of the White House. I mean, do you not think that that is in itself unusual here?”
TRUSTY: “Well, I think there’s a lot that’s unusual. I don’t envy Lindsey Halligan being put into the storm, but I don’t really think that Lindsey is the one that’s necessarily making all the decisions here. We don’t know what’s happening behind closed doors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. We don’t know how long the Deputy A.G. and A.G. have been on this matter, deciding whether or not they think it’s a case. And let me just tell you, there’s different things. Selective prosecution and vindictive prosecution are two separate things. But at the end of the day, if you’re able to point to an Inspector General report and say, ‘Hey, look, here’s the Inspector General specifically saying, ‘Comey set a dangerous example for 35,000 FBI employees because he wrongly leaked information to The New York Times that he shouldn’t have even possessed,’’ that’s their finding in that investigation. And so, if you have witnesses that are locked in, if you’ve talked to the special employee, maybe you’ve even talked to The New York Times. I mean, there may be ways of proving this case quite nicely at Comey’s expense. And before we relegate him to Patrick Henry (status for being such a patriotic hero, let’s remember his little seashell shenanigans, where a former director of the FBI makes fun of killing the president.”