The 5-Minute Fix: What the Comey memos do (and don’t) reveal about Trump

April 22, 2018

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By Amber Phillips

We have an even fuller picture of what fired FBI director James B. Comey thinks President Trump did wrong. All seven of Comey's memos detailing his private conversations with Trump were shared with Congress this week — and soon after, the media. Comey testified last summer about his concerns about Trump and leaked part of those memos to the media.

Former FBI director James B. Comey is sworn in during a Senate hearing in June. (Alex Brandon/AP)

There's so much attention on Comey's memos because they lift the curtain on what Trump ostensibly thinks of Russia and the Russia investigation in private — but they're only Comey's perspective.

As such, Trump and his allies were quick to claim that the memos disprove the allegations connected to the president: that his campaign colluded with Russia to influence the election and that he obstructed the subsequent investigation.

Democrats, meanwhile, are literally suing Russia and accusing the Russian government of working with Trump to cause Hillary Clinton to lose.

So what facts do the Comey memos actually reveal? Let's break them down.

1. There's no new evidence Trump and Russia colluded, but there's no evidence they didn't collude

Trump and Putin at a G-20 summit in Germany in July. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Comey writes that he told the White House the FBI had corroborated portions of an infamous dossier that alleges Trump-Russia collusion during the election: “I explained that … much of it was consistent with and corroborative of other intelligence.”

Much of the dossier, but not all of it. As The Fix's Aaron Blake points out, we don't know what the FBI has corroborated: “And just because some parts have been corroborated doesn't mean the entire document is gospel.”

Comey did write that Trump was frustrated that his aides didn't tell him immediately that President Russian Vladimir Putin called in the first days of his presidency. It's another example of the president sounding concerned about his relationship with Putin.

But the bottom line is this: We don't know whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the presidential election. A bipartisan Senate investigation and an investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III looking into exactly that are still ongoing.

2. Comey was concerned that the president was illegally blunting the Russia investigation

Comey and Trump in January 2017. (Andrew Harrer /Bloomberg /Pool)

Comey says he wrote these memos to document potential evidence of a crime by the president.

He certainly documents plenty of conversations with Trump that worried Comey. Comey says Trump asked for loyalty, twice, in one dinner. Another time, Comey says Trump asked him to drop the FBI's investigation into his newly fired national security adviser, Michael Flynn. (Flynn would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI.)

Republicans fire back that Comey didn't explicitly say Trump obstructed justice, so therefore Trump didn't. But legal experts say what constitutes obstruction is a legal judgment for Mueller's team to make — not for an FBI director jotting down his feelings in the aftermath of a meeting that made him feel uncomfortable.

3. Trump may have breathed life into the prostitute rumor

Trump in March (David Maxwell/EPA-EFE)

First, here's the rumor, which we don't talk about a lot because it's unsubstantiated: The dossier claims that Trump watched prostitutes urinate on themselves in Moscow, and that Russia has a tape of it to blackmail Trump.

According to Comey, Trump repeatedly brought up the allegation to Comey and repeatedly denied it. Comey went so far as to say Trump seemed fixated on it. And then, in February, Comey says Trump told him this:

“The President said ‘the hookers thing’ is nonsense but that Putin had told him ‘we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.’ ”

Wait, when did Trump talk with Putin about hookers, if at all, asks The Post's Philip Bump. The answer, which we don't know, could shed light on whether Trump talked with Putin during the election — lending credence to the idea that Trump and Russia had a relationship at the highest levels — and whether Russia does have blackmail material on Trump.

To sum up: We have no new evidence one way or the other on collusion, and we learned some new claims about prostitutes and how fearful Comey was that the president was meddling in his FBI investigation. That's the bottom line from Comey's memos, which are all one person's interpretation of events.

There is so much more political news beyond Comey, but it's a beautiful Friday afternoon in Washington, so I'm going to try to take advantage of it. We still have tons of great Fix content below, and you can catch up on the five biggest political headlines of the week with me in this video. Thanks for reading and watching!