Members of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees will question former FBI Director James Comey Friday morning. After much wrangling, the interview will take place behind closed doors. Comey wanted it to be public, but lawmakers, unwilling to cut up their questioning into five-minute slices for a public setting, insisted on a private session. The House won. But both sides agreed that a transcript of the interview will be released quickly, perhaps as quickly as 24 hours after the meeting.
Republicans were divided about whether to interview Comey at all. He has testified many times, written a book, and publicly discussed his tenure in office at great length. Some Republicans preferred to bring in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has been resisting an appearance on Capitol Hill. “It’s been nine weeks since the press reported that Rod Rosenstein was contemplating wearing a wire to record the president and invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told me recently, “and we’re spending time bringing in Comey for the 15th time?”
Nevertheless, Comey is coming in. Some Republicans want to ask him more about the Hillary Clinton case, but even some of them acknowledge that the case is over and done with. Others want to focus on the Trump-Russia affair. That includes a lot of material. There will, for example, undoubtedly be some questions about the Trump dossier, the origins of which Republicans have done extensive work to expose.
But one particularly useful area of questioning would be the case of Michael Flynn, the short-term Trump national security adviser who pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI and who this week received a no-jail sentencing recommendation from Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller. Comey spoke privately to Congress about the Flynn case on a few occasions in 2017. But so far, all the public knows about those statements are a few snippets of testimony included in a House Intelligence Committee report and a few others from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley. If Comey were questioned about it in some detail Friday, and if the transcript of that conversation were released, then the public might finally learn more about the case. With that in mind, here are ten questions for Comey on the subject of Michael Flynn:
1. Did you read the wiretap transcripts of conversations between Flynn and then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak? If not, were they described to you or synopsized for you by other government officials?
2. Did you read the so-called 302 report written by the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017? If not, was it described to you or synopsized for you by other government officials?
3. Did you ever discuss the Flynn interview with the agents? In any event, what, precisely, did the agents report on the question of whether or not Flynn was truthful in the interview?
4. Did the agents believe Flynn tried to deceive them?
5. If the agents did not believe Flynn was lying, how did they — or you — reconcile the differences between what Flynn said in the FBI interview and what he said in the transcript of the Flynn-Kislyak conversations?
6. Did Flynn, a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency with a deep knowledge of surveillance practices, at any time in the interview acknowledge or refer to the fact that his conversations with Kislyak were recorded by U.S. intelligence? Did he ever acknowledge that the transcripts of his conversations were available to FBI officials?
7. What other evidence did the FBI have that Flynn lied to the agents?
8. Did you believe, a week after the interview, that Flynn would be indicted for lying to the FBI? Did you believe, by early May 2017, before you were fired, that Flynn would be indicted for lying to the FBI?
9. When did you learn that Flynn would be charged and had pleaded guilty? What was your reaction?
10. Other than the Flynn-Kislyak conversations, are you aware of any other instances in which Flynn took part in any activities as part of a conspiracy with Russia to fix the 2016 election? If so, what were they?
