Trump & W/H Russian Meeting Post Comey: The Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost

No American Media — Russian State Media only

(Trump: “I fired Comey” / Lavrov: “Wow, no kidding”)

The NY Times reported that in the immediate aftermath of James Comey’s firing the FBI launched a probe into “… whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.”

It’s worth reviewing the precise chain of events here from TPM written by Josh Marshall – worth reading.

Also, this piggybacks on my post, same subject, seen here – FYI.

1. Trump fired Comey May 9, 2017.

2. The following day, Trump received Russia FM Sergei Lavrov and Russian Amb. Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office at Vladimir Putin’s request.

3. The W/H indeed confirmed that Trump had held the meeting because Putin had personally asked him to from a phone call a few days earlier, in a W/H statement reported on here from Politico and from The New Yorker reporter Susan Glasser in part saying: “President Trump chose to receive them because President Putin asked him to. Putin did specifically ask on the call when they last talked.”

4. American media was barred from the event, but the Russian state-run news agency, TASS (Russian: TACC) was invited to cover the meeting, and the photos that were later released all came out of Russia.

Significant:

At the meeting, Trump told Lavrov and Kislyak that he had just fired Comey and that it had removed the “pressure” he was under because of the FBI investigation into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia. 

Trump told them: “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

(Note: That is according to an internal government summary document based on notes taken during the meeting).

5. At the same meeting, Trump also shared highly classified intelligence about the ISIS with Lavrov, intelligence that apparently came from Israel and some say it jeopardized field sources and operations in Syria.

The NY Times article says that FBI agents felt ‘validated” in their decision to act so quickly and decisively when these quotes from the President to Lavrov surfaced. This makes it seem like this wasn’t itself part of the decision but vindicated the decision after the fact. But that may be a bit misleading.

The summary of the discussions was first revealed to The New York Times nine days later on May 19th, presumably after the FBI had already kicked off its investigation. It seems plausible that the FBI would have had access to this information before the Times. But if we take the Times’ reporting from last night on its face, they only learned what the President said after they started the probe.

Even if that’s the case, the fact of the meeting itself, held at President Putin’s request and with no American press allowed would have raised alarm bells throughout the intelligence and counter-intelligence worlds and almost certainly figured into the decision to launch the investigation.

My 2 cents: All this reporting ties in the gaffe by Paul Manafort’s lawyers who did a poor job of redacting information that I posted about here.

The walls are closing in on Trump and that’s why White House Counsel Pat Cipollone just hired 17 new lawyers to help defend Trump (apparently at all costs) against Mueller and his expected more pressure on Trump.

Stay tuned and thanks for stopping by.