Rep. Matt Gaetz said former FBI Director James Comey would likely be in prison if President Trump had sooner installed a spy chief who declassified secrets that suggest a cover-up in the Obama administration.
The Florida Republican fumed on Wednesday over the contents of a fully declassified email former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice sent to herself about a January 2017 Oval Office discussion on the Michael Flynn investigation, in which Comey told former President Barack Obama that he was conducting the inquiry into President Trump’s incoming national security adviser “by the book.”
“If lies were music, Susan Rice would be Mozart,” Gaetz told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “If I were writing myself an email where three times I had to say I did everything ‘by the book,’ that is certainly more incriminating than it is exculpatory.”
“Look at the last three tweets from Jim Comey,” he said. “You have a flower, an attack on the Department of Justice that’s probably investigating him, and praise for the removed, disgraced now-former Chairman of the Intelligence Committee Richard Burr.”
Gaetz said believes Comey would be in prison if acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell was overseeing the Intelligence Community in 2017. Grenell has recently released a trove of declassified documents on the Russia collusion investigation as a possible conspiracy against Trump, distinguishing himself from his predecessors who resisted Republican pressure to unveil the records.
“If Ric Grenell had been the director of national intelligence back in 2017, Jim Comey would probably already be under the jail because the Grenell disclosures laid bare the coup before the American people,” Gaetz said. “Obama was involved, Biden was involved, Susan Rice was involved, and Jim Comey was set up to be the inside man going from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.”
The Russia inquiry, which Trump often called a “witch hunt,” is under scrutiny now by a federal prosecutor hand-picked by Attorney General William Barr.
