Rep. Jordan on holding the FBI accountable after release of Flynn documents
Republican Rep. Jim Jordan sounds off after new documents are released on the 2017 questioning of Michael Flynn in the Russia probe.
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In light of new explosive FBI documents that reveal an alleged scheme to set up then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, went after former FBI Director James Comey for his handling of the investigation.
Comey admitted in 2018 that the decision to send a pair of agents to interview Flynn was not standard for investigating White House officials.
Jordan, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, told “Fox & Friends" Thursday that Comey displayed "arrogance" and "ego" with the way he spoke about the Flynn case.
Asked to describe how two FBI agents ended up at the White House to interview Flynn in January 2017, Comey, told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace a year later, “I sent them.”
COMEY ADMITS DECISION TO SEND FBI AGENTS TO INTERVIEW FLYNN WAS NOT STANDARD
Comey went on to acknowledge the way the interview was set up – not through the White House counsel’s office, but arranged directly with Flynn – was not standard practice. He called it “something I probably wouldn't have done or maybe gotten away within a more … organized administration.”
Describing how it is usually done, Comey said in the December 2018 MSNBC interview, “If the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel, and there would be discussions and approvals and who would be there.”
Recalling his decision to bypass those steps, Comey said, “I thought: ‘It’s early enough, let’s just send a couple of guys over.’”
“There was a process,” Jordan said, reacting to Comey’s comments made during the interview.
“They should have notified the White House Counsel that they were coming over to talk to Michael Flynn … they weren’t square with General Flynn, a guy who served this country, [a] three-star general. It is so wrong what they did,” Jordan said.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: IF JUDGE WON'T DISMISS MICHAEL FLYNN CASE, TRUMP SHOULD PARDON HIM
Meanwhile, the release of FBI documents that show officials discussed their motivations for interviewing Michael Flynn in the White House in January 2017 — and openly questioned if their "goal" was "to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired."
The handwritten notes – by the FBI's former head of counterintelligence Bill Priestap after a meeting with then-FBI Director James Comey and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Fox News is told – further suggested that agents planned in the alternative to get Flynn "to admit to breaking the Logan Act" when he spoke to then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition period.
The Logan Act is an obscure statute that has never been used in a criminal prosecution; enacted in 1799 in an era before telephones, it was intended to prevent individuals from falsely claiming to represent the United States government abroad.
"What is our goal?" one of the notes read. "Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?"
"If we get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act, give facts to DOJ + have them decide," another note read. Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley called the document's implications "chilling."
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Jordan pointed out the numerous FBI scandals that have resulted from Comey’s leadership, particularly on the FBI's conduct in the Trump-Russia investigation dating back to 2016.
“Remember, Comey is the guy in charge and all this happened under his watch: McCabe, Baker, Strzok, Page, all these key people at the upper echelon at the FBI,” Jordan said.
“Everything we’ve said now for several years: the only thing we had wrong is it was worse than we thought and Americans are fed up with this and they want it cleaned up.”
Fox News' Gregg Re and Alex Pappas contributed to this report.