Rachel Maddow got an exclusive as she has verified that former US Attorney and Trump DOJ official Dana Boente has notes that back up Comey’s story of Trump obstructing justice.
Video of Maddow introducing her exclusive:
Rachel Maddow drops a scoop about Dana Boente being interviewed by Mueller. #Maddow pic.twitter.com/XkLl3yCcZA
— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) April 11, 2018
Maddow dropping the bomb on Trump:
Rachel Maddow drops the exclusive on Trump. #Maddow https://t.co/WyHT1xqJ6d pic.twitter.com/rMmZN9VXK4
— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) April 11, 2018
Maddow said:
He asked for legal representation or commitment to pay his legal fees. Couple of weeks later he gets a certification that his handwritten notes from a conversation with James Comey shouldn’t be marked top secret. That was improper, they are not classified as all. Now, we don’t know for sure, because these are the documents we got. What we surmise is that Boente is getting his ducks in a row so he can show these handwritten notes to people while preparing for his interview with Mueller, or perhaps more directly he’s preparing to hand over those notes to Mueller as part of this interview. Well, we have also obtained those handwritten notes. Notes from Dana Boente on his conversations with James Comey while Comey was FBI director, specifically we have obtained his notes from a conversation in which Comey says he was pressured by the president about the Russia investigation. This is key to the question of whether or not the president may be criminally liable for obstruction of justice.
Comey told Congress in June after he was fired that the president had pressured him on the Russia investigation in a phone call on March 30th of last year. He told Congress I can give you from his testimony, quote, immediately after that conversation, I called acting deputy attorney general Dana Boente to report the substance of the call from the president. This is a key, key matter in the question of whether the president could be liable for obstruction. Comey says the president pressured him. The white house responded by saying, no, the president did no such thing. Comey says, hey, I’ve got corroborating evidence for my side of the story and that corroborating evidence is that I told other senior justice department and FBI officials about what happened between me and the president at the time it happened.
Since then, Comey himself and a number of officials he says he told at the time about the president’s behavior have all ended up on the proverbial guillotine, right, including Comey himself, fired and attacked by the president as a liar, attacked by Republicans and conservative media for almost a year. Also deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, fired and attacked in much the same way. Mccabe says it’s because he can corroborate Comey’s testimony from his interactions with the president at the time. Other people briefed by Comey at the time have also been mysteriously demoted and/or attacked by the president ever since. He’s been picking off those witnesses one by one. Well, Dana Boente is one of those officials who Comey briefed at the time. And yeah, he did end up getting pushed out of the justice department in mysterious circumstances this past fall and we don’t really get that yet. But he’s at the FBI now as their general counsel, and we have now obtained what we believe are his contemporaneous notes from his conversations with Comey at the time of Comey’s troubling interactions with the president March 30th. And those notes do corroborate in very striking terms exactly what Comey says happened between him and the president.
If this is the kind of evidence that Robert Mueller has in the obstruction of justice investigation, Trump is going down.
Rachel Maddow just showed the world corroborating evidence that backs up Comey’s story. Trump has been calling James Comey a liar for nearly a year, but he has provided no proof to support his claims. Thanks to Dana Boente’s notes, James Comey has proof, and what Rachel Maddow showed the world should be enough to get Trump charged with obstruction of justice.
For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
- Trump And House GOP’s Promise To Not Cut Social Security Is Total Nonsense - Fri, Dec 20th, 2024
- Trump And Mike Johnson Agree To Apparently Cut Americans’ Healthcare To Pay For Tax Cuts For The Rich - Fri, Dec 20th, 2024
- Dozens Of Republicans Humiliate Trump/Musk By Voting Down CR - Thu, Dec 19th, 2024
