Travel Records Belie What Trump Told Comey About Russia Trip

Travel Records Belie What Trump Told Comey About Russia Trip

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

President Donald Trump appears to have misled former FBI Director James Comey about his trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in 2013, according to flight record obtained by Bloomberg. Though Trump reportedly told Comey that he didn’t stay overnight in the Russian city, per the director’s contemporaneous memos of their private meeting, the flight records and social media posts show that Trump stayed overnight in the city at a hotel.

This development is significant because it undermines Trump’s denials that the Russian government has blackmail material on him as mentioned in the Steele dossier, in the form of a video recording of him with prostitutes. The dossier’s author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, said sources told him that Trump had been videotaped with prostitutes at a hotel while he stayed overnight during the pageant.

Comey’s memos of his meetings with Trump in 2017 show that the president was preoccupied with proving these claims false. He claimed it couldn’t’ be true because he didn’t spend the night in Moscow. He even suggested that he might ask Comey to investigate the claims to show that they were untrue, but he never officially made this request.

The records clearly show, Bloomberg reports, that Trump arrived in Moscow on a Friday and didn’t leave until Sunday morning.

The fact that Trump appears to have lied when he said he didn’t even stay overnight in Moscow doesn’t prove the allegations are true, of course. He may have simply been overzealous in his denunciations of the dossier’s claims.

But it does call into question Trump’s fundamental credibility. He has called Comey a liar, saying that he never asked for the former director’s loyalty or encouraged him to drop the FBI investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

These facts could someday play a part in an obstruction of justice charge against the president or in articles of impeachment. Given that Trump’s credibility is highly questionable, he may have a hard time defending himself against these allegations.

Cody Fenwick is a reporter and editor. Follow him on Twitter @codytfenwick.

Advertising

Start your day with National Memo Newsletter

Know first.

The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning

American History Proves We Can Still Save Democracy From Trumpism

The Lincoln Memorial

Have you ever thought about the role guilt has played in our national life? It’s not omnipresent, it’s certainly not felt by everyone, most especially those sinned against, but I would say guilt rivals pride as the thing that has most motivated us. Think about it for a moment. The founding of this country wasn’t an immaculate birth – for one thing, there wasn’t a Founding Mother among all those long-heralded Founding Fathers, and one of the two greatest mistakes they made the day they came to an agreement on our founding document was what they left out. They didn’t award women full citizenship, and they failed to deal in any way with the sin of slavery.

Keep reading...Show less
How Fox Props Up The House Republicans' Impeachment Farce

Sean Hannity

Fox News propagandists are still eagerly shoveling Rep. James Comer’s (R-KY) slop to their viewers, nearly one year into the House Oversight Committee chair’s shambolic campaign to damage President Joe Biden’s political standing by focusing on his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

Keep reading...Show less
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}