Former federal prosecutor Jim Trusty told “The Source” host Kaitlan Collins on Thursday how former FBI Director James Comey used a “special employee” to make leaks.
A federal grand jury indicted Comey on Thursday night on charges of lying to Congress and obstruction over testimony given during a September 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Trusty, who represented President Donald Trump in the classified materials case, said that people should look at “the specifics of the false statement.”
“You do have a grand jury that indicted. They carefully considered the case. They actually shaved it down to an area that makes a lot of sense,” Trusty told Collins, a former Daily Caller White House correspondent. “You know, nobody’s actually talking about the specifics of his false statement. But this was a director of the FBI who had a special employee designed for one purpose: to leak things to The New York Times.”
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“Now, when he was pressed in Congress on whether or not he had leaked something, he had authorized the leak of a memo he retained wrongfully at his house, he said, ‘No, that’s not my recollection.’ They challenged him about McCabe, another guy who had referrals to the Inspector General for lying, and Comey said, ‘That’s not my recollection,’” Trusty continued. “So, in a weird way, through all this chaos, through all this kind of political interest of what’s going on behind closed doors, who knew what, at the end of the day, the indictment that’s left is actually pretty simple. He either lied about leaking to The New York Times in a tantrum because he was getting fired, or he didn’t.”
Andrew McCabe, now an analyst for CNN, was fired as the FBI Deputy Director in 2018 following an inspector general’s report that accused him of lying about leaks to the media. His termination was reversed in 2021 following a legal settlement with the Department of Justice after President Joe Biden took office.
Trusty explained that while there were unusual aspects to the case, there appeared to be real crimes involved.
“We don’t know how long the Deputy AG and AG have been on this matter, deciding whether or not they think it’s a case. And let me just tell you, there’s different things, selective prosecution and vindictive prosecution are two separate things,” Trusty told Collins. “But at the end of the day, if you’re able to point to an Inspector General report and say, ‘Hey, look, here’s the Inspector General specifically saying, ‘Comey set a dangerous example for 35,000 FBI employees because he wrongly leaked information to The New York Times that he shouldn’t have even possessed,’ that’s their finding in that investigation.”
“And so, if you have witnesses that are locked in, if you’ve talked to the special employee, maybe you’ve even talked to The New York Times. I mean, there may be ways of proving this case quite nicely at Comey’s expense,” Trusty continued. “And before we relegate him to Patrick Henry (status for being such a patriotic hero, let’s remember his little seashell shenanigans, where a former director of the FBI makes fun of killing the president.”
Comey was fired in 2017 during Trump’s first term in office, following a recommendation from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
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