Former FBI boss James Comey is a narcissist with an agenda and a nasty and unprofessional habit of leaking, yet his testimony to Congress yesterday destroys the media conspiracy theories.
NO, Comey is not alleging Trump tried to obstruct justice in telling him he hopeed the FBI would clear sacked national security advisor Michael Flynn - "I don't think it's for me to say whether the conversation I had with the president was an effort to obstruct."
NO, Comey did not take that expression of Trump's hope to be an order to drop the probe - "those words are not an order". Comey simply interpreted them as a "direction", but one he ignored: "I mean, this is a president of the United States with me alone saying I hope this. I took it as, this is what he wants me to do. I didn't obey that, but that's the way I took it."
NO, Trump never asked Comey to stop investigating claims of Russian involvement in the 2016 US election - "Not to my understanding, no."
NO, Trump didn't ask Comey to hide any evidence of collusion between his team and Russian intelligence. In fact, the opposite: "He said, and if some of my satellites did something wrong, it'd be good to find that out."
NO, New York Times' claims of extensive contacts between Trump's associates and Russian intelligence were false - "in the main, it was not true".
No, there's no proof of Russian collusion.
NO, Flynn was not central to any allegation of collusion with Russia -dropping any investigation into him would have been "unlikely" to affect the Russian probe. This means Flynn could not have testified against Trump with any dirt.
NO, Trump did or suggested or ordered nothing after that initial conversation with Comey to get the FBI to drop any investigation into Flynn.
YES, if Trump had wanted to kill the investigation into Flynn he could have issued an order as president.
And, YES, Comey had refused to publicly clear Trump of what he knew were fake media smears.
At least CNN and ABC have now apologised for one hate-Trump falsehood - that Comey would deny he'd told Trump he was not under investigation.
Even MSNBC host Chris Matthews says Comey's evidence collapses the conspiracy theories - although you wouldn't guess that from Australia's media coverage.
In fact, Comey's evidence was most damning of Barack Obama's Attorney-General, who seems far likelier to have abused her authority over Comey to protect Hillary Clinton.
But the media Left will look after its own, and will not easily give up its mad insistence that Trump must be guilty and face impeachment.
CONCLUSION
So what is left of the case against Trump? It is that he expressed a hope - not an order - in one conversation with Comey about Michael Flynn, the national security advisor he'd just sacked the day before for lying.
This is what Trump allegedly said:
I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is good guy. I hope you can let this go.
We now know that Comey agreed Flynn was a good guy, that Trump did not order the investigation dropped and that Flynn was not central to any investigation of collusion with Russia, anyway.
We also know Trump denies he asked for suggested Comey drop the investigation.
The Way I See It.....the charge against Trump lies entirely in how to interpret his expression of a hope - as being just that, or being a direction which Comey ignored to do something that was of little consequence anyway.
Loose change - and everything else has been fake news.
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