Read the full text of James Comey's Senate testimony opening remarks...

[trailmonkee]

from abcnews website...

"Here is the full text of the prepared remarks that former FBI director James Comey will deliver when he testifies in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

This statement was released in full today by the committee.

Statement for the Record Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

James B. Comey June 8, 2017

Chairman Burr, Ranking Member Warner, Members of the Committee. Thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. I was asked to testify today to describe for you my interactions with President-Elect and President Trump on subjects that I understand are of interest to you. I have not included every detail from my conversations with the President, but, to the best of my recollection, I have tried to include information that may be relevant to the Committee.

January 6 Briefing

I first met then-President-Elect Trump on Friday, January 6 in a conference room at Trump Tower in New York. I was there with other Intelligence Community (IC) leaders to brief him and his new national security team on the findings of an IC assessment concerning Russian efforts to interfere in the election. At the conclusion of that briefing, I remained alone with the President Elect to brief him on some personally sensitive aspects of the information assembled during the assessment.

The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.

The Director of National Intelligence asked that I personally do this portion of the briefing because I was staying in my position and because the material implicated the FBI’s counter-intelligence responsibilities. We also agreed I would do it alone to minimize potential embarrassment to the President-Elect. Although we agreed it made sense for me to do the briefing, the FBI’s leadership and I were concerned that the briefing might create a situation where a new President came into office uncertain about whether the FBI was conducting a counter-intelligence investigation of his personal conduct."

Link to complete article: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/read-full-text-james-comeys-senate-testimony-opening/story?id=47894256

[question everything]

1. Still curious of who leaked it. Was it Ms. Reality? (nt)

[Blue_Roses]

2. Me too.

Why would we be hearing about this BEFORE he testifies? Something just stinks here.

[trailmonkee]

3. just a prepared statement - seems pretty standard

[Blue_Roses]

5. Just read it

Nt

[trailmonkee]

4. the good thing is - it is flooding the media and will make it almost impenatrible for Trump to....

penetrate things with distractions.... for the next few days at least

[GetRidOfThem]

6. I read the whole thing on the link. Some initial issues I see...

1. There was a lot of noise about Trump insisting that Comey had told him he was not under investigation. This has now been confirmed by Comey. So Trump did not lie, about this one....

2. Question that needs to be asked by the committee: "Mr. Comey, you said in your statement that you did not wish to make public proclamations that the President was not himself under investigation, because if this status changed, you'd have to update the public. This would obviously also warn the President he is under investigation, which could harm the investigation. Mr. Comey, did you at any point feel that the president might in reality become a target of the investigation? Is this why you took this precaution?"

3. The loyalty thing: Comey should have never caved like that, even though he really meant he was going to be loyal with the truth, id did sound too much like he was going to be truthfully loyal.

So the whole thing is about attempted obstruction, but we know nothing about the Russia connection yet. That is what we expected, because Mueller is handling this. But beyond Trump leaning on Comey to try to end this thing and publicly state that Trump is not being investigated, which was true at the time, there is no other smoking gun.

I want more...

[trailmonkee]

7. Hopefully they will ask him about the 'that thing' statement....

.... it sounded like a threat of exposure or the retaking of something special he (Trump) shared or gifted to Comey?