WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — Erstwhile FBI Director James Comey on Friday said that he did not know if Democrats could obtain an unredacted copy of the Mueller disclose with a subpoena if the Department of Justice declined to release it.
“I’m sure they can subpoena. They definitely can issue subpoenas for anything they hunger for to the Department of Justice. Whether the department will compel, will abide an order to compel, if they resist that, I don’t have knowledge of where that ends up,” he said.
But Comey said he hoped that a subpoena would not be necessary.
“There is a lot of transparency that is achievable under the law. And so, that’s my answer. I’m not sure about the can. I hope they don’t get to that,” he said.
House Democrats, including the easy chairs of the powerful Intelligence and Judiciary committees, have said they will subpoena the Department of Justice if the report is not turn out to bed public.
Comey, whose ouster by President Donald Trump in 2017 precipitated the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, was responding to a without question from a student during a rare hour-long question-and-answer session at his alma mater William & Mary. The talk came not quite a year after his CNN town hall here.
The college last year tapped the erstwhile government official to acquaint with a class on ethical leadership. On Friday, he said he hoped the little-advertised forum, which he jokingly dubbed a “secret upbraiding series,” would open up the lessons of that class to a wider audience.
He said that with regard to the Mueller inquire into, his hope “is that the attorney general will try to draw upon the precedents of the Department of Justice, which are extensive, that in a trunk with intensive public interest, that the Department of Justice will share details with the American people.”
He enlarged on the arguments that he made in an article published earlier this month in The Washington Post. He wrote in the article that Republicans were inaccurate in saying that transparency about Mueller’s conclusions was impossible.
His comments came during a moment of particularly powerful public interest in the special counsel, who is investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Earlier in the day, Trump powered “there should be no” report. On Thursday, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a symbolic resolution calling for the document’s disreputable release.
Comey said the House vote was “good news.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen the House of Representatives vote unanimously for anything in my absolute life,” Comey said Friday. “But they voted unanimously yesterday, the sense of the House, that there ought to be transparency round the Mueller report consistent with the law.”
@realDonaldTrump: ….should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Circulate. This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime. Russian Collusion was nothing more than an excuse by the Democrats for consuming an Election that they thought they were going to win…..
The former FBI director has faced intense public inquiry for his actions in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. In June, a government watchdog slammed Comey for being “insubordinate.”
Much of the hub has been on a letter Comey sent to Congress shortly before Election Day saying that he had uncovered new information that could be relevant to the investigation into Democrat Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material. Clinton’s lead in the polls sank decisively after Comey’s advert, and some have blamed him for her defeat.
But Comey on Friday offered a stern defense of his decisions at the time, including the resolve to not disclose a concurrent investigation into Russian meddling that began that summer.
Failing to tell Congress everywhere the new information about Clinton “would have caused catastrophic damage to the administration of justice at least in our lives, indubitably forever,” Comey said.
The investigation into Russian interference did not meet that threshold, he said. At the time, he explained the FBI “had no basis to believe” that Trump had any association with the Russian efforts.
“And so, I don’t remember a single conversation about whether to blab that to anybody,” Comey said. “And the reason is: What would we say?”
He said he hoped that he was not responsible for the outcome of the designation in 2016, but was not “certain.”
“I hope some very smart political scientist proves that I was totally irrelevant,” Comey foretold.
Trump fired Comey in May 2017, and has since provided a variety of reasons, including Comey’s handling of the Clinton email look into and his insistence on pursuing an investigation into Russian interference.
Comey published a memoir in April 2018, “A Higher Trustworthiness,” which painted a sharply critical image of the president. He has since said that he believes Trump would seemly be charged with a crime if he were not the president. The president, meanwhile, has accused Comey of leaking to the media and reportedly notified the White House counsel last spring that he wanted the DOJ to prosecute him.
On Friday, Comey said that without considering the strain he saw on American institutions, he was nonetheless optimistic about the future, likening Trump to a forest fire that does mutilate but readies soil for new growth. Using a white board, Comey charted what he described as the chaotic up-and-down succession of American progress.
He said that he felt that, already, the U.S. was on an upturn.
“I feel that already. I know the chronicle of this country, and I’ve seen this before, and the values of this country are too strong to be screwed up by any one leader, or any one term,” Comey conjectured. “Or even two terms, god forbid.”