Nothing Comey did was illegal - the information was neither privileged nor classified, and he was a private citizen at the time he shared it.
Trump has shown that he has no problem redefining words to fit his purposes - look at "fake news", for instance. It doesn't mean what he has been using it to mean: news that is less than complimentary to him. Yet his followers have picked up on it and label EVERYTHING they don't like as "fake news". Actual "fake news" would be the right-wing conspiracy theories ("Pizzagate" and Seth Rich come to mind immediately), the stories that are made up out of whole cloth with absolutely no evidence to support them, the "click-bait" stories that bring in revenue to the ones who post them, and the propaganda stories spread by the Russians. When WAPO publishes a well-documented story that includes 30 sources, it's NOT fake news. Trumpsters may not like what's being reported, but that doesn't make it fake.
And for those, including Trump, who say it was somehow "cowardly" for Comey to release the memo through a friend, I would point to this - it's no more "cowardly" than waiting for a person to leave town and travel to the West Coast before sending a representative to his office with a letter telling him he's fired, and then having that person find out he was fired through news reports while he was in the middle of a speech to FBI recruits. Trump's signature line on reality TV was '"You're fired!", but he didn't have the guts to say that to Comey. |
