THE MEMO: Team Trump sees silver lining in Comey cloud
Aides and allies of President Trump are focused on the upside of former FBI director James Comey’s momentous testimony to Congress.
Their take is that Comey’s appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee was damaging but not devastating; that the former FBI director threw his best punches without putting Trump in imminent legal peril; and that they can now look forward to a period of relative calm as special counsel Robert Mueller gets on with the investigation of Russian meddling in U.S. politics — in the absence, they hope, of leaks.
But the rosy scenario rests on there being “no distractions” going forward, and the capacity of Trump himself to “turn the page,” as veteran Republican strategist Charlie Black said. Many question whether he will be able to do so.
Trump already scrambled the picture with a headline-making performance at a news conference Friday in the White House Rose Garden with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.
Trump said he would “100 percent” be willing to testify under oath about his exchanges with Comey; accused the former FBI director of saying things that “just weren’t true” under oath — a de facto accusation of perjury; and said that he would tell the media within “a very short period of time” whether he had tapes of his Comey encounters, as a now-famous May 12 tweet implied.
With those remarks, he ensured that the storm over Comey would rage again.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/337204-the-memo-team-trump-sees-silver-lining-in-comey-cloud?rnd=1497136542
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If he'd learned to keep his mouth shut and his phone off, he could have avoided many crises.
These are nearly all self-inflicted!
May it continue.
