begin quote from:
President gambles that there's no smoking gun in the Comey case
Trump bets there's no smoking gun in Comey case
(CNN)President Donald Trump may just have bet the farm.
Trump
said Friday that he was ready to testify under oath to special counsel
Robert Mueller to deny former FBI chief James Comey's claim that the
President asked him to back off his investigation into former national
security adviser Michael Flynn.
"I
didn't say that," Trump said of Flynn's claim. Asked at a Rose Garden
news conference whether he would testify under oath to Mueller to that
effect, Trump replied: "100 percent." He added, "I would be glad to tell
him exactly what I just told you."
The
President's response could signal that he is convinced he has done
nothing wrong and that Comey's testimony before the Senate Intelligence
Committee on Thursday is no more than a lie.
Effectively,
he was establishing a straight comparison between his word and Comey's
on what went on in meetings and phone calls that made the former FBI
chief so uncomfortable that he wrote down what happened.
Alternatively,
it's possible that Trump may be calculating that there is no
incriminating, objective proof about what occurred, leaving two
irreconcilable versions of the same encounters.
CNN
presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said that in two recent
parallel situations in which Presidents Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon
were accused of wrongdoing, there was accompanying incontrovertible
evidence.
"In Clinton's case, there
was Monica Lewinsky's blue dress. In Watergate, you had the White House
tapes. We don't have the smoking gun evidence at this juncture,"
Brinkley said.
Significantly,
Trump also used his appearance on Friday to deliver a broad hint that
there are not, despite his earlier warning to Comey on Twitter, any
tapes of their meetings and phone calls.
If
such tapes exist, they could provide corroboration of either Trump's
comments or the account of their meetings provided by Comey.
The
former FBI chief testified on Thursday that he suddenly woke up in the
middle of the night a few days after Trump tweeted that he better hope
there were not tapes, with the same thought.
"Lordy, I hope there are tapes," Comey said at the hearing.
Trump's
aggressive strategy since the Comey hearing would be a rash one indeed
if such tapes, which the law would require him to hand over to
investigators, are stashed away somewhere in the White House.
He told reporters on Friday that he would reveal if there are any tapes "over a fairly short period of time."
Then he added a teasing, cryptic comment that could indicate no such recordings exist.
"Oh, you're going to be very disappointed when you hear the answer, don't worry," Trump told reporters.
Still, Trump's approach represents a serious gamble, that could get him into deep legal and political waters if if backfires.
For
one thing, if he were to go under oath with Mueller, he would not know
for sure what kind of evidence the special counsel would bring to the
table.
And depending on the
conditions of the encounter, Trump might also open himself up to
questioning on other issues, and risk saying something that may later
turn out to be untrue and place himself in legal and political jeopardy.
"What
was most interesting to me is his willingness to say 'I will say this
under oath' ... that message is -- we will take the he said, he said ...
and may the best, if you will, man win," Michael Zeldin, a former
special assistant to Mueller when the special counsel headed the FBI,
told CNN's Brooke Baldwin Friday.
Comey's
verbatim notes written after his meetings with Trump would likely put
his evidence in a more credible light than Trump's, should the President
not have a record of his own conversations, Zeldin said.
"If there is a tie, I think that helps tip the tie toward the Comey side," he said.
Even
so, it is questionable whether a GOP-controlled House of
Representatives would move towards impeachment proceedings in a case
simply based upon Comey's word against Trump's.
That
may be the reason why the President, even if he is not telling the
entire truth about his meetings with Comey, believes it is unlikely he
will ever have to pay up on the bet that he made Friday.
And
there is also no guarantee that Trump, despite saying he would testify
before Mueller, will not change his mind about going under oath given
the risks, or could be compelled to do so.
No comments:
Post a Comment