'Vindication?' Not so fast, Mr. Trump
Those who were playing the Trump Twitter drinking game -- take a drink every time President Donald Trump tweets -- during James Comey's Senate committee testimony came away surprisingly sober.
For two days, the president maintained Twitter silence, causing surprised followers like me to wonder if he had dozed off, or worse.
But at 6:10 a.m. on the morning after former FBI Director Comey appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Trump reappeared in the Twittersphere with this: "Despite so many false statement and lies, total and complete vindication ... and WOW, Comey is a leaker!"
Oh, really? As often happens with Trump's tweets, this one fiddles with facts. That's not an extraordinary development for our serial-exaggerator president, who has never backed off his ludicrous claim to the biggest inauguration crowd ever.
In similar fashion, Comey's testimony raised more questions than vindication, except for those who -- like Trump -- dismiss inconvenient facts as "fake news." He cannot shrug off ongoing investigations by the Senate committee and special counsel Robert Mueller of ties between Trump's campaign and Russian officials.
Mueller's investigation followed what, so far, is the most pivotal tweet of Trump's presidency. On May 12, he typed: "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"
That was the tweet, according to Comey's account to the Senate Intelligence Committee, that spurred him as a private citizen to make a special request to a friend, Columbia Law professor Daniel Richman.
Comey asked Richman to tell the New York Times about the memos he had written to describe his interactions in private meetings with President Trump. The memos described why Comey thought the president had asked him, as FBI director, to drop the FBI's criminal investigation into Trump's former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
The Times story appeared seven days after Comey was fired.
Was that a "leak," as Trump calls it? Comey was passing his own memos, not classified documents, to the Times. As he told the Senate, he hoped the disclosure would lead to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia's involvement in the 2016 election and possible collusion with associates of the president's campaign. It did.
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