Donald Trump screws up and admits James Comey’s memos are true
It was easy to miss, in the midst of a day which also saw Donald Trump ranting about an unnamed “drunk/drugged up loser” and vowing to pardon a man who’s been dead for seventy years. But somewhere in the middle of Trump’s latest psychological breakdown, he screwed up badly – in both a perceptual sense and a legal sense – when he tried to falsely accuse former FBI Director James Comey of a crime, and ended up admitting something else instead.
Here’s what Trump tweeted: “James Comey’s Memos are Classified, I did not Declassify them. They belong to our Government! Therefore, he broke the law! Additionally, he totally made up many of the things he said I said, and he is already a proven liar and leaker.” To be clear, whatever you think of Comey, he didn’t violate any laws. Some of the information in his memos became classified after he released them, which means he did nothing wrong. It’s the same trick the Republicans used to falsely accuse Hillary Clinton of leaking classified information.
The trouble here is that Trump is trying to make two contradictory arguments at once: he’s claiming Comey’s memos are both true and false. By acknowledging that the information in Comey’s memos has since become classified, he’s acknowledging that this information is true. U.S. intel agencies don’t classify information that’s been “totally made up,” as Trump alleges. So Trump is unwittingly giving a huge amount of credibility to Comey’s memos.
Yesterday Donald Trump tried to make the argument on Twitter that because James Comey’s memos are phony, the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller is somehow illegitimate. This is a phenomenally weak argument to begin with. But if Trump was planning on trying to use it to legally justify anything he might be thinking about doing, he just sabotaged it by admitting that the memos in question are based on information so real that it ended up becoming classified.
