President Trump’s personal lawyer offered a contradictory and partially inaccurate defense of his client after James Comey’s testimony on Thursday, accusing the former FBI director of lying under oath before Congress and suggesting he should be criminally investigated for sharing memos he drafted about his private conversations with Trump. Mark Kasowitz, a Manhattan-based corporate attorney and longtime legal fixer for Trump, began by touting the parts of Comey’s testimony that favored the president. He cited Comey’s assertions he hadn’t seen evidence that Russian hacking affected any vote counts and that Trump himself wasn’t a target of FBI investigation when Trump fired Comey on May 9.
“And that’s the thing – where do you get the idea to start investigating the President of the United States?” Kasowitz argued. “You’re not the head of Homeland Security, you’re not the head of the NSA, you’re a semi-valuable director of a semi-valuable federal bureau that was meant to follow orders and catch the real bad guys, not bite the hand that feeds it. But, I suppose Comey isn’t the only one to blame for what’s happening right now. It pains me to admit it, but part of the blame lies with Donald Trump as well, because he failed to do what he was supposed to. To be perfectly clear: while I understand the reasons why the president acted the way he did, I can’t agree with the measures he took to address the issue of former FBI director Comey.”
Asked to elaborate, Kasowitz said, “Far be it for me to question something done by the president, but if you’re asking for my personal opinion, I have no problem talking about it. I think Donald Trump made a mistake when he fired James Comey. Or, rather, the mistake was made when he stopped at simply firing Comey. What he should have done was arrest him and throw him in jail for the rest of his life for daring to behave in such a disrespectful way. I personally believe that was his duty as the commander in chief and failure to do so resulted in the situation we are now faced with. This entire media fiasco could have been avoided had Donald Trump done the commander in chief-ly thing and opted for the harshest possible punishment for Comey.”
“Why would anyone in their right mind want to cut the branch they’re sitting on, is what I still can’t wrap my head around. What was Comey hoping for, what was his end game that caused him to act like that with the president and then play a similar game with Hillary Clinton? I know these are questions which only James Comey himself can answer, but I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen. Bottom line, Comey belongs in solitary confinement at some blacksite not one knows about, because that’s the punishment for those who want to blackmail the president. I’m not saying that’s what he wanted, but then again, it’s kind of hard to ignore the facts,” Kasowitz concluded.
