In short, Trump’s Thursday morning tweet was high on the defensive meter but registers pretty low on the accuracy scale. “Still, because Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 point, the letter was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.” “At a minimum, its impact might have been only a percentage point or so,” Silver concluded after crunching the numbers. At a maximum, it might have shifted the race by 3 or 4 percentage points toward Donald Trump, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida to him, perhaps along with North Carolina and Arizona.” … The impact of Comey’s letter is comparatively easy to quantify, by contrast. Nate Silver of, a site that focuses on analyses of mostly political and sports issues, wrote this: “ Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. In it, Comey informed a list of House and Senate committee chairmen that he had reopened the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s handling of emails while she was secretary of State. 28, 2016 - 12 days before voters went to the polls to decide whether Trump or Clinton would become the 45th president of the United States. The allegation, like the others, is undercut by the bureau’s actions just before Election Day.Ĭonsider the letter then-FBI Director James B. The tweet represented the second time in three days Trump has appeared to hold policy views much different from many of his top White House aides and Cabinet officials.īut back to his charge that the FBI used something against him in the 2016 election. “House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.” This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others? Though the White House on Wednesday evening called for the House to vote to reauthorize the law and touted its “useful role” in national security, Trump the next morning suggested he wants it ended. government on behalf of a foreign entity. The House later Thursday voted to reauthorize the controversial law, which sets parameters for the electronic surveillance of individuals suspected of conducting espionage against the U.S. It is not immediately clear if the commander in chief is referring to the Steele dossier or, as a later Thursday morning tweet seemed to suggest, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. Then there is the president’s suggestion that the FBI used an “intel tool to influence the Election.” So, based on Simpson’s testimony and reporting from major media outlets, it would be more accurate to say the dossier was paid for in part by a law firm connected to the Clinton campaign. Fusion then retained the services of Steele. What is public record, so far, is that the Clinton campaign and the DNC hired the firm through Marc Elias, a lawyer with the firm Perkins Coie, to conduct research on Trump and Russia. That undercuts his claims that the dossier was produced via purely partisan efforts. Trump’s tweet excludes any mention that an unknown “Republican client” funded the firm’s work on his Russia ties even before the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee inquired about retaining its services. The president’s claim that the Democratic Party paid for the Steele dossier is also murky at best. Do you understand that?” Simpson replied: “Yes, I do.” That statute applies to your statements in this interview. Code “makes it a crime to make any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation in the course of a congressional investigation. Grassley, informed Simpson at the start of the session that the U.S. That’s because while he was not under oath, Patrick Davis, the deputy chief investigative counsel for panel Chairman Charles E. If the Fusion co-founder misled the Judiciary Committee staffers during the August interview, he did so knowing it could result in jail time. “One of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization.” He added that the FBI had a “walk-in” whistleblower who was someone in Trump’s orbit. “They believed Chris might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing,” Simpson said. In fact, Simpson told the Judiciary Committee that when Steele was interviewed by FBI officials in Rome in September 2016, the bureau signaled they had obtained some of the information he had collected prior to him even writing the first memo in his dossier.
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