On Thursday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) compared President Donald Trump to a “robber” holding “a gun to somebody’s head” before she started to question former FBI director James Comey.
According to Comey’s recollection, when Trump and Comey were alone in the Oval Office on February 14, Trump said his former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn “is a good guy” and added, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
“You and I are both former prosecutors. I’m not going to require to you answer,” Harris told Comey. “I just want to make a statement that in my experience of prosecuting cases when a robber held a gun to somebody’s head and said I hope you will give me your wallet, the word hope was not the operative word at that moment.”
In my experience, when a robber held a gun to somebody’s head & said “I hope you’ll give me your wallet,” “hope” wasn’t the operative word. pic.twitter.com/WVb7978p1k
— Kamala Harris (@SenKamalaHarris) June 8, 2017
Earlier in the hearing, Sen. James Risch (R-ID) said he wanted to “drill right down” on the “allegations that the President of the United States obstructed justice.”
When Comey said he kept saying Trump’s words (“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”) because “I took it as a direction,” Risch jumped in and said, “You may have taken it as a direction, but that’s not what he said.”
“Correct,” Comey said in agreement.
When Risch asked Comey if he knew of “anyone that’s been charged for hoping something,” Comey replied, “I don’t, as I sit here.”
As Breitbart News Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak noted, “Comey all but destroyed any hope Democrats had for bringing a case of obstruction of justice” against Trump with that response.
Harris later noted that “today’s testimony was about uncovering the facts, the information, and the truth about this investigation. This is about the office of the presidency, a hostile foreign government interfering in our elections, and the integrity of our government. We deserve answers.”
“Today, we got some of them—but the fight continues, especially as this White House continues to lie and muddy the facts,” she said.
The grandstanding Senator then added that “from here on out, we need to be mindful of two things: one, this is not a TV show—it is a very serious matter and must be treated that way; and two, this process should not make us forget the fact that Senate Republicans are still trying to rip health care away from millions of Americans, undo consumer protections put in place after the 2008 recession, and so much more.”
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