No. of Recommendations: 7
So there's at least one lie.I doubt that's what they're going to use. That's pretty unlikely to hold up as the basis for a prosecution, because it isn't a lie.
Here's the full section of that exchange:
Do you recall a discussion between you and the CIA about whether the Steele dossier should be included as part of the intelligence community assessment? Mr. Comey: (01:05:22) I remember some interaction with my fellow leaders of the intelligence community agencies that were part of that assessment. I don't know whether it was over email or on the phone about how that we were contributing this material to the effort and how they were going to approach it. John Cornyn: (01:05:37) You don't recall that Director Brennan said it should not be included as part of the ICA because it has not been verified? Mr. Comey: (01:05:47) I don't know whether it was Brennan. I remember being told that the group's view was it was significant enough and consistent enough with other intelligence that it ought to be included, but it wasn't sufficiently corroborated to be in the body of the intelligence community assessment. So they put a brief summary of it in an annex. https://www.rev.com/transcripts/james-comey-testim... But....those statements are
true. The dossier materials
were put in an
annex to the ICA. Per Grassley's own office:
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases...No legalistic parsing of "included" necessary. The characterization of it as a "brief summary" is opinion, not fact - so that also can't be a basis for a perjury claim, even if reasonable people can disagree about whether a particular summary is "brief" or not (the Grassley press release makes it clear that the dossier was not included in its entirety, so it was certainly summarized to some degree).
Again, I was sort of hoping that since you're more plugged into conservative discussions about this issue, you might have some insight into what might be the alleged lie justifying the indictments. The article you linked to talks about a number of grievances conservatives have with Comey, but isn't really pointing out any actual
lies he told Congress. Has anyone actually come out and speculated on what the false statement(s) actually are?
