Earlier today there was an interesting filing in the Comey case, demonstrating that despite a weak criminal case, there is the prospect of interesting disclosures.
First, it’s frustrating that nearly 10 years after the events, we are still seeing new documents. Amidst all of the investigations and FOIA work, why are there new documents?
We still need more details on this room, the burn bags, and why these handwritten notes were “not known” to prior investigative teams. It doesn’t make much sense at this juncture.
Exhibit 5 shows that Comey knew Richman was talking to the media in late October 2016:
This was just after Comey had announced he was re-opening the Clinton email investigation. Comey offers an odd comment about a likely Clinton President being grateful for his doing so. It feels like a bit of a “CYA” deal, and we’ve speculated privately that his re-opening of the investigation served as a shot across the bow to get her people to stop pushing so hard on the Trump-Russia collusion angle.
Exhibit 7 shows the coordination with the media to craft the narrative. We can also see the email was produced to the government from Richman’s email account based on the to/from with Comey’s throwaway account. There is an obvious question of whether the government has obtained documents from Comey’s personal email accounts.
The remaining exhibits are more of the same, showing open coordination with the New York Times to present a false narrative to the public on Trump-Russia collusion and obstruction, which Comey knew to be false.
In Exhibit 12, we find that Jack Eckenrode is part of the investigating team against Comey. That is fairly bizarre, he was formerly assigned to the Special Counsel Durham team. That obviously poses the question, why didn’t Durham find this and why didn’t Durham bring the case?
Exhibit 13 - Comey’s handwritten notes. There is a reference to Clinton’s plan to tie Trump to Russia, which had just been referred to the FBI by the CIA.
The Trump finance/Russia debt ties into the Steele dossier and Alfa Bank allegations and was complete garbage. As to the NYT reference, the prosecutors seem to be implying Richman involvement here, but it is more likely this is a reference to the NYT running an article on the Alfa Bank allegations—which Sussmann had told the FBI was happening when he delivered the allegations on September 19th.
That’s all for now. Activity will be picking up here with a few pieces in the works.