Category: Not Factual

Sessions Discussed Trump Campaign-Related Matters with Russian Ambassador, U.S. Intelligence Intercepts Show

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Russia’s ambassador to Washington told his superiors in Moscow that he discussed campaign-related matters, including policy issues important to Moscow, with Jeff Sessions during the 2016 presidential race, contrary to public assertions by the embattled attorney general, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s accounts of two conversations with Sessions — then a top foreign policy adviser to Republican candidate Donald Trump — were intercepted by U.S. spy agencies, which monitor the communications of senior Russian officials in the United States and in Russia. Sessions initially failed to disclose his contacts with Kislyak and then said that the meetings were not about the Trump campaign.

One U.S. official said that Sessions — who testified that he had no recollection of an April encounter — has provided “misleading” statements that are “contradicted by other evidence.” A former official said that the intelligence indicates that Sessions and Kislyak had “substantive” discussions on matters including Trump’s positions on Russia-related issues and prospects for U.S.-Russia relations in a Trump administration.

Sessions has said repeatedly that he never discussed campaign-related issues with Russian officials and that it was only in his capacity as a U.S. senator that he met with Kislyak.

“I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign,” Sessions said in March when he announced that he would recuse himself from matters relating to the FBI probe of Russian interference in the election and any connections to the Trump campaign.

Current and former U.S. officials said that that assertion is at odds with Kislyak’s accounts of conversations in two encounters during the campaign, one in April ahead of Trump’s first major foreign policy speech and another in July on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention.

The apparent discrepancy could pose new problems for Sessions as his position in the administration appears increasingly tenuous.

Trump, in an interview this week, expressed frustration with Sessions’s recusing himself from the Russia probe and indicated regret at making the lawmaker from Alabama the nation’s top law enforcement officer. Trump also faulted Sessions as giving “bad answers” during his confirmation hearing about his Russia contacts during the campaign.

Officials emphasized that the information contradicting Sessions comes from U.S. intelligence on Kislyak’s communications with the Kremlin, and they acknowledged that the Russian ambassador could have mischaracterized or exaggerated the nature of his interactions.

“Obviously I cannot comment on the reliability of what anonymous sources describe in a wholly uncorroborated intelligence intercept that the Washington Post has not seen and that has not been provided to me,” said a Justice Department spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, in a statement. She reasserted that Sessions did not discuss interference in the election.

Russian and other foreign diplomats in Washington and elsewhere have been known, at times, to report false or misleading information to bolster their standing with their superiors or to confuse U.S. intelligence agencies.

But U.S. officials with regular access to Russian intelligence reports say Kislyak — whose tenure as ambassador to the United States ended recently — was known for accurately relaying details about his interactions with officials in Washington.

Sessions removed himself from direct involvement in the Russia investigation after it was revealed in The Washington Post that he had met with Kislyak at least twice in 2016, contacts he failed to disclose during his confirmation hearing in January.

“I did not have communications with the Russians,” Sessions said when asked whether anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign had communicated with representatives of the Russian government.

He has since maintained that he misunderstood the scope of the question and that his meetings with Kislyak were strictly in his capacity as a U.S. senator. In a March appearance on Fox television, Sessions said, “I don’t recall any discussion of the campaign in any significant way.”

Sessions appeared to narrow that assertion further in extensive testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June, saying that he “never met with or had any conversation with any Russians or foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election in the United States.”

But when pressed for details during that hearing, Sessions qualified many of his answers by saying that he could “not recall” or did not have “any recollection.”

[Washington Post]

Trump Regrets Hiring Attorney General Jeff Sessions

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US President Donald Trump has said he would never have appointed Jeff Sessions if he had known the attorney general was going to recuse himself from leading a Russia investigation.

Mr Trump told the New York Times the actions of Mr Sessions had been “very unfair to the president”.

Mr Sessions recused himself after admitting meeting Russia’s ambassador.

He said on Thursday he would not resign and he would continue running the Justice Department effectively.

“I plan to continue to do so as long as that is appropriate,” he said.

The president also accused Mr Sessions of giving “some bad answers” at his confirmation hearing performance.

With Donald Trump, loyalty will only get you so far.

Mr Sessions was the earliest and most enthusiastic of Mr Trump’s top-tier political supporters, and he was rewarded with a plum Cabinet appointment. Now, however, that position of power appears not quite as golden a prize.

While the former Alabama senator has toiled to implement the president’s agenda as attorney general, Mr Trump personally blames him for the ongoing independent counsel investigation that has bedevilled his presidency.

The irony is that while Mr Trump views Mr Sessions’s recusal from the Russia probe as a betrayal, the attorney general made clear during his confirmation hearings that he would likely do just that if he were implicated in an investigation that had not yet begun in earnest.

It was only later that then-FBI Director James Comey – himself a target of the president’s scorn – revealed the Trump campaign itself was under the microscope.

Now the president has made clear that Mr Sessions lacks his full confidence. While the attorney general says he loves his job and plans to keep it, how secure can his position be when his boss lobs bomb after bomb his way from the White House?

Mr Sessions would have headed the justice department’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election. Congress is also conducting inquiries.

His recusal ultimately led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to lead the investigation.

The Times interview reflects the anger the president feels at this development.

He said: “A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case… Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.”

Mr Trump said Mr Sessions had given him “zero” notice of the recusal.

“How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president.”

‘I didn’t do anything wrong’

Mr Trump then reflected on the performance of Mr Sessions at his Senate confirmation hearing in January at which he denied meeting any Russians. He later revealed he had met Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Mr Trump said: “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers… He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”

The president suggested the justice department’s Russia investigation was rife with conflicts of interest, not least that Mr Mueller had wanted to replace James Comey, who Mr Trump had sacked as FBI director.

“There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point,” Mr Trump said.

Mr Trump warned Mr Mueller about straying too far from his remit but again said he did not think he was personally being investigated.

“I don’t think we’re under investigation,” Mr Trump said. “I’m not under investigation. For what? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

US media have reported that Mr Mueller is investigating Mr Trump for possible obstruction of justice, both in the firing of Mr Comey and over whether Mr Trump tried to end an inquiry into sacked national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Associated Press news agency quoted a Trump adviser as saying that the president’s comments did not mean he was going to sack the attorney general, but the adviser questioned whether such a public dressing-down might prompt him to quit.

[BBC News]

Reality

Mr Sessions actually recused himself citing Department of Justice regulations stating employees should not participate in investigations of a campaign if they served as a campaign adviser.

Trump’s False Claim That His Presidential Approval Rating is ‘Not Bad’

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Six months into his presidency, Donald Trump is putting a positive spin on the latest round of public polling on his job performance.

“The ABC/Washington Post Poll, even though almost 40% is not bad at this time, was just about the most inaccurate poll around election time!” Trump tweeted Sunday morning, July 16.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll actually showed Trump’s approval rating at 36 percent — not almost 40 percent, as the president stated.

We decided to fact-check Trump’s claim that his approval rating is “not bad at this time” by comparing his numbers to those of other presidents at the six-month mark.

How does Trump’s approval rating compare to other presidents?

Since the middle of the 20th century, pollsters have been systematically tracking responses to the question: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way (president’s name) is handling his job as president?”

As a result, a modern-day president’s performance can be tracked against that of historical predecessors as far back as Harry Truman.

So what to make Trump’s claim that his six-month approval rating is “not bad”?

Before turning to that question, an important caveat is that a widely cited average of Trump approval rating polls by Real Clear Politics does show Trump’s rating hovering around 40 percent. But the focus of this fact-check is on the ABC News/Washington Post poll, because that’s the one Trump singled out in his tweet.

According to Gallup and ABC News/Washington Post polling data, the average six-month presidential approval rating is around 62 percent — well above Trump’s approval rating of 36 percent.

The results look even bleaker when Trump’s numbers are placed side-by-side with other presidents.

According to data compiled by ABC News, Trump has the worst approval rating in the last seven decades compared to other presidents at roughly the same period in their presidency.

The second worst approval rating is that of President Gerald Ford, at 39 percent.

Trump’s net approval rating (percent approval minus disapproval) of -22 percent is also a historic low since presidential polling of this kind began.

Only two other presidents — Bill Clinton and Ford — had negative net approval ratings at this point in their tenure.

“Politicians always want to claim they are doing well in the polls,” said Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “But Donald Trump’s claim that his ratings are ‘not bad’ compared to other president’s doesn’t square with available historical data, which shows his approval rating below all presidents for whom we have data at this point in their presidencies.”

Our ruling

Trump said his six-month approval poll numbers are “not bad” relative to other presidents at this point in his presidency.

Not bad isn’t a scientific term, but by any sober measure Trump is performing relatively worse compared to his contemporaries, as well as any president since World War II.

We rate his claim False.

[PolitiFact]

Trump Makes Up 45,000 New Mining Jobs

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President Donald Trump boasted Monday that the nation added 45,000 mining jobs recently — but there’s scant data to back that up. One thing there is evidence for: Only 800 coal mining jobs have been created during his tenure.

“In Pennsylvania, two weeks ago, they opened a mine, the first mine that was opened in decades….Well, we picked up 45,000 mining jobs in a very short period of time,” Trump said during an event pegged to American manufacturing. “Everybody was saying, ‘Well, you won’t get any mining jobs,’ we picked up 45,000 mining jobs. Well, the miners are very happy with Trump and with Pence, and we’re very proud of that.”

President Donald Trump boasted Monday that the nation added 45,000 mining jobs recently — but there’s scant data to back that up. One thing there is evidence for: Only 800 coal mining jobs have been created during his tenure.

“In Pennsylvania, two weeks ago, they opened a mine, the first mine that was opened in decades….Well, we picked up 45,000 mining jobs in a very short period of time,” Trump said during an event pegged to American manufacturing. “Everybody was saying, ‘Well, you won’t get any mining jobs,’ we picked up 45,000 mining jobs. Well, the miners are very happy with Trump and with Pence, and we’re very proud of that.”

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to bring back coal jobs and attacked Hillary Clinton for turning her back on the industry.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates there are roughly 50,800 coal mining jobs nationwide, 800 of which have been added since Trump took office. (The six months before that, under President Barack Obama’s administration, 1,300 coal jobs were added.)

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard Trump’s numbers. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt made a similar claim speaking about all mining and logging jobs earlier this year, earning a PolitiFact ruling of “mostly false.”

BLS data estimates the nation has added roughly 41,500 new mining and logging jobs in the first six months of 2017, but just 1,000 of them are mining (not including oil and gas mining jobs, which account for another couple thousand.)

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The coal industry often creates spinoff jobs as mining towns need doctors, schools and diners, for instance. There are notably many truck drivers, electricians and other professionals working with coal companies whose livelihood depends on coal production, but these jobs are not counted in federal BLS data on coal mining, according to Terry Headley, communications director for the American Coal Council.

The Pennsylvania mine opening that Trump touted on Monday is expected to create 70 jobs.

[NBC News]

Spicer Contradicts Emails, President on Trump Jr Meeting

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White House press secretary Sean Spicer contradicted President Donald Trump Monday when he insisted that a meeting Donald Trump Jr. had with a Russian lawyer in the months leading up to the election was about adoption policy.

“The President has made it clear through this tweet. And there was nothing, as far as we know, that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for a discussion about adoption and the Magnitsky Act,” Spicer said at an off-camera briefing with reporters. “But I would refer you back to counsel on that one.”

In his first appearance at the White House briefing since June 26, Spicer repeated the same defense that Trump Jr. originally offered on July 8 when he was asked about the meeting — that it was a nothing but “short introductory meeting … about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago.”

However, Trump Jr. later admitted he took the meeting because he was promised compromising information about Hillary Clinton when he publicly released his email exchange with Rob Goldstone, a publicist who helped set up the meeting.

The subject line of the back-and-forth between the two was “Russia – Clinton – private and confidential,” and Trump Jr. was promised incriminating information on Hillary Clinton from a “Russian government attorney” that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” according to the emails.

“If it is what you say I love it,” Trump Jr. wrote.

Though Spicer maintained that the meeting was only about “adoption and the Magnitsky Act,” Trump Jr. told Sean Hannity last Tuesday he had “never even heard of” the Magnitsky Act “before, you know, that day.”

Spicer’s statement also contradicts the President, who has acknowledged his son took the meeting in order to get damaging information on his opponent and defended him for doing so, saying “that’s politics.”

“Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” Trump tweeted earlier Monday.

Trump said the same during a gaggle with reporters on Air Force One as he flew to Paris last week.

“Honestly, in a world of politics, most people are going to take that meeting,” Trump said. “If somebody called and said, ‘hey’ — and you’re a Democrat — and by the way, they have taken them — ‘hey, I have really some information on Donald Trump. You’re running against Donald Trump. Can I see you?’ I mean, how many people are not going to take the meeting?”

The White House did not immediately respond to a CNN request for clarification about Spicer’s remark.

[CNN]

Trump defends Donald Trump Jr. in Sunday morning tweetstorm

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President Donald Trump defended his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., on Twitter Sunday morning amid mounting questions about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, implying a media double standard in its treatment of Hillary Clinton.

“HillaryClinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?” Trump wrote.

The President’s latest tweet on the matter comes as questions continue to swirl about the June 2016 meeting, which included at least eight people, including Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and the Russian lawyer, sources familiar with the meeting told CNN. Trump Jr. took the meeting on the premise that he would get information from the lawyer that would be damaging to Clinton’s campaign, according to emails Trump Jr. posted on Twitter last week.

The meeting has put fresh scrutiny on the actions of Trump’s family and campaign officials as federal investigators probe whether the campaign colluded with Russians in Moscow’s attempt to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.

The President also commended ex-campaign adviser Michael Caputo for publicly denying knowledge of any alleged contacts between the campaign and Russia after testifying privately to the House intelligence committee Friday.

“Thank you to former campaign adviser Michael Caputo for saying so powerfully that there was no Russian collusion in our winning campaign,” Trump tweeted.

Caputo, a former top adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign with strong ties to Russia, said at a press conference after his testimony that “there was absolutely not discussion of Russia” in the Trump campaign while he was there.

“I spent my time in front of the committee detailing the fact that I had no contact with Russians, that I never heard of anyone with the Trump campaign talking with Russians, that I was never asked questions about my time in Russia, that I never even spoke to anyone about Russia, that I never heard the word ‘Russia,’ and we did not use Russian dressing,” Caputo told reporters. “There was absolutely no discussion of Russia on the Trump campaign ’til the day I left.”

Caputo resigned from the campaign on June 20, 2016 after celebrating the dismissal of then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski with a tweet that said, “Ding Dong the witch is dead.” Manafort replaced Lewandowski as chairman.

Trump also continued his broadside of the news media in his Sunday morning tweets, claiming without providing evidence that news agencies use phony unnamed sources in their stories.

“With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!” Trump tweeted.

[CNN]

Trump: I’ve ‘Done More in Five Months Than Practically Any President in History’

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President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that the current mood in the White House is “fantastic,” despite recent pressure following allegations surrounding his son’s involvement with Russia during last year’s election campaign.

In a wide ranging interview with Reuters, the president also claimed that his administration “had done more in five months than practically any president in history.”

“If you look at Iraq and if you look at Syria and you see the progress we’ve made with ISIS, it’s been almost complete,” he said, referring to militant and terrorist group Islamic State, according to a transcript of the interview posted on Reuters’ website.

“The White House is functioning beautifully. The stock market has hit a new high. Job numbers are the best they’ve been in 16 years. We have a Supreme Court judge already confirmed. Energy is doing levels that we’ve never done before. Our military is doing well. We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS, which Obama wasn’t. There’s not a thing that we’re not doing well in.”

Trump’s assertion about the current mood in the White House flies in the face of media reports this week. The Washington Post said Wednesday, citing officials and outside advisors, his team had been thrusted into “chaos” after revelations of a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a lawyer characterized as linked to the Russian government.

Trump continues to split opinion in the U.S, and around the globe, and many would also question his comments on his team’s achievements. Speaking to CNBC on Wednesday, Barry Diller, chairman of IAC, said Trump’s presidency has so far been a “joke.”

“He hasn’t done anything, really. I think it’s just a joke. Hopefully it will be over relatively soon,” Diller said. “It inexplicably began and it will inexplicably end.”

[CNBC]

Reality

The claim that Trump has done more than any president in history to this point is a tired one that doesn’t comport with basically any objective measure. There has been no signature legislation, several courts halted his travel ban before the Supreme Court allowed part of it, and there have been several controversies. Trump made this same claim after 90 days, and it got four Pinocchios from The Post’s Fact Checker.

 

Trump Defends Trump Jr.: ‘I Applaud His Transparency’

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President Trump on Tuesday praised his son, Donald Trump Jr., who is under fire for meeting with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have compromising information about Trump’s Democratic rival in the presidential race, Hillary Clinton.

“My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency,” Trump said in a brief statement, which White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders read to reporters during an off-camera briefing.

Trump had previously remained silent on the growing controversy surrounding the meeting at the height of the campaign, which became public Saturday.

The revelation has shaken the White House, which for months has struggled to contain the fallout from a wide-ranging investigation into Russia’s election-meddling effort in 2016.

Sanders acknowledged that, “the president is, I would say, frustrated with the process of the fact that this continues to be an issue.”

“He would love for us to be focused on things like … the economy, on healthcare, on tax reform, on infrastructure and that’s the place that his mind is and that’s what he’d like to be discussing,” she said.

Sanders, however, did not dispute stunning new emails disclosed by Trump Jr. Tuesday detailing efforts to set up the meeting.

She was peppered with questions about the stunning disclosure during the 21-minute briefing, repeatedly referring reporters to attorneys representing the president and his eldest son.

The lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Sanders did engage some questions about the meeting, saying it’s “ridiculous” to use the words “treason” or “perjury” to describe Trump Jr.’s behavior, as some critics have alleged.

The spokesman stood by her Monday claim that Trump Jr. did not collude with Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

She said she was not able to say the last time the president spoke with his son and refused to say whether Trump now believes Russia interfered with last year’s election.

Sanders also denied that Vice President Pence was trying to distance himself from the Trump Jr. controversy by putting out a statement saying he is “not focused on stories about the campaign… especially those about the time he joined the ticket.”

“There is absolutely no distance between the president and the vice president,” she said.

Michael Flynn was fired in February as national security adviser in large part because he misrepresented his conversation with Russia’s U.S. ambassador to Pence. The vice president went on television and denied Flynn discussed sanctions with the Russian envoy, even though he did.

[The Hill]

Reality

Donald Trump Jr. didn’t release the emails out of some altruistic sense of transparency, the New York Times obtained the emails and asked him for a comment from him before releasing them to the public.

Trump Jr. never responded to the request, and instead released the emails, most likely in a self-server move to get out in front of the story.

If it really was about transparency, Trump Jr. would have released the emails months before the New York Times broke this story.

Trump accuses James Comey of breaking the law — based on a misleading Fox News report

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President Trump’s first day back in the office after his brief trip to Europe began, as so many do, with a flurry of tweets. It seems that Trump, as he so often does, tuned in to “Fox and Friends” on Monday morning, the show on which he made regular Monday-morning phone-in appearances prior to his entry into politics. And, as he has in the past, Trump appears to have taken information out of context to level a serious charge against a political opponent.

The relevant sequence of events goes like this. In the show’s six-o’-clock hour, it ran a segment addressing a report from the Hill about memos FBI Director James Comey wrote documenting his conversations with Trump prior to being fired.

After that segment aired, the show’s social media team tweeted a clip:

The president retweeted it — following up with thoughts of his own.

In short order, adviser Kellyanne Conway was promoting the story on ABC, calling it the real bombshell of the day (unlike that story about Donald Trump, Jr.).

It’s obvious why Trump’s team embraced this idea that Comey had leaked classified information to his friend: It reinforces the president’s prior arguments that the man he fired was the real villain in their interactions. After Comey testified on Capitol Hill, Trump suggested that the testimony was a complete vindication of himself and that Comey was “a leaker.” This charge was based on the revelation that Comey had given one of those memos about his conversations with Trump to a friend to give to the New York Times. In a later tweet, Trump set the table for his enthusiasm Monday morning, asking if Comey’s use of the memos was “totally illegal?”

The “Fox and Friends” segment begins with a snippet of Comey’s testimony. A Fox News host then summarizes:

It turns out, he may actually have broken the rules. A brand-new bombshell report accuses Comey of putting our national security at risk. According to the Hill, the former FBI director’s personal memos detailing private conversations with President Trump contained top secret information.

In the tweet, that becomes “Report accuses material James Comey leaked to a friend contained top secret information.”

If Comey gave classified information to someone without security clearance to leak to the press, it’s problematic. But that’s not what the Hill’s report says.

That report says that there were a total of seven memos prepared by Comey after his nine conversations with Trump. Four of those memos are marked as classified at the “secret” or “confidential” level, officials told the Hill.

In other words, the pool of documents looks like this.

It’s true that “the former FBI director’s personal memos detailing private conversations with President Trump contained … secret information,” as the Fox report summarizes, though not, apparently, top secret material. (The levels of classifications go “confidential,” “secret” and then “top secret.”) But the wording on that Fox report is misleading. The memos contained classified information is true when considering the memos as a group. It is not true, though, that each memo contained classified information — or, at least, it’s not true that each memo was marked as being classified.

This issue came up during Comey’s June testimony, at which point Comey made clear that the memo he gave to his friend to leak, documenting a meeting on Feb. 14 of this year, was not one that included classified material.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.): I found it very interesting that, that in the memo that you wrote after this February 14th pull-aside, you made clear that you wrote that memo in a way that was unclassified. If you affirmatively made the decision to write a memo that was unclassified, was that because you felt at some point, the facts of that meeting would have to come clean and come clear, and actually be able to be cleared in a way that could be shared with the American people?


Comey: Well, I remember thinking, this is a very disturbing development, really important to our work. I need to document it and preserve it in a way, and this committee gets this but sometimes when things are classified, it tangled them up.


Warner: Amen.


Comey: It’s hard to share within an investigative team. You have to be careful how you handled it for good reason. If I write it such a way that doesn’t include anything of a classification, that would make it easier for to us discuss within the FBI and the government, and to hold onto it in a way that makes it accessible to us.

He also during that testimony indicated that the same didn’t hold true for all of the memos he wrote.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.): The memos that you wrote, you wrote — did you write all nine of them in a way that was designed to prevent them from needing classification?


Comey: No. On a few of the occasions, I wrote — I sent emails to my chief of staff on some of the brief phone conversations I had. The first one was a classified briefing. Though it was in a conference room at Trump Tower, it was a classified briefing. I wrote that on a classified device. The one I started typing in the car, that was a classified laptop I started working on.

(Note that Heinrich refers to nine memos, assuming that there was one for each of Comey’s interactions with the president.)

During his testimony, Comey refers to the memo he gave to his friend in the singular — “the memo.” There’s no indication that he asked that one of the classified memos be leaked. In fact, his testimony — under oath, remember — was the opposite.

In other words, Comey asserted that the scenario looked something like this:

The tweet from “Fox and Friends” based on the Hill report is incorrect. And so, too, is Trump’s tweet. If there was classified information in the memo that Comey asked his friend to leak to the Times, that’s not yet been reported.

Which is not to say that Comey’s behavior was without concern. FBI agents sign an agreement prohibiting unauthorized disclosures of certain types of material. The Hill’s report notes that the FBI apparently considers Comey’s memos to have been government documents, not his own personal memos as he asserted on Capitol Hill. The repercussions of that aren’t clear.

This is not the first time that Trump has seen a misleading bit of information on “Fox and Friends” and made the problem worse. In March, the show looked at data on the release of prisoners from Guantanamo, which Trump then used to attack President Barack Obama. One might have thought that Trump would have learned his lesson at that point.

But it appears that the opportunity to hammer his political opponents is often too urgent in his mind to ensure that he’s doing so accurately.

[Washington Post]

Update

Fox News issued a rare correction, stating they were wrong. No retraction yet from the President of the United States of America.

Trump: ‘Everyone’ at G-20 talking about Podesta not giving server to authorities

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At this week’s G-20 summit in Germany, one subject the world’s most powerful leaders are discussing is why Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman did not cooperate with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials as they investigated cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee, President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter Friday morning.

“Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!” Trump wrote on Twitter Friday morning. He did not explain why Podesta, who did not work for the DNC, would have been responsible for its email server.

Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the DNC, noted that discrepancy in a post to Twitter, linking to Trump’s post and writing that “1) Podesta never ran the DNC. 2) DNC worked with FBI to kick out Russians. Worked with DHS. 3) Putin make you tweet this before mtg?”

Amid the months-long swirl of reporting surrounding Russia’s efforts to interfere in last year’s presidential election, as well as allegations that Trump associates may have colluded with Russia in those efforts, the president has sought to cast blame on the DNC, former President Barack Obama and others for not doing enough to stop the hacking.

And while he has eagerly accused Obama, the DNC and Podesta of negligence or worse, the president has stopped short of outright blaming Russia for launching the campaign of cyberattacks. Instead, he has said only that he thinks Russia was involved, but that other nations and individuals could have been involved as well.

Trump said Thursday at a press conference that “nobody really knows for sure” if Russia was behind the campaign of cyberattacks, even though the intelligence community he leads as president has expressed certainty that the Kremlin is to blame.

The president is scheduled to meet Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the pair’s first face-to-face meeting since Trump’s election. The White House has not said whether or not Trump plans to bring up Russia’s campaign of election-year cyberattacks.

[Politico]

Reality

At this week’s G-20 summit, Donald Trump again attacked an American while on foreign soil.

Two issues here:

  • Podesta worked for the Clinton campaign and did not work for the DNC, so he would not have been responsible for its email server.
  • Reporting about the DNC hack shows the FBI never asked for the servers. (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html)
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