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The second high-profile stop for former FBI Director James Comey on his book tour Thursday was MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. Just as the show began the White House released all of the memos Comey kept on his interactions with the President, so the interview was dominated by softball questions mostly stemming from those. But as the show was wrapping up, Maddow took the opportunity to rhetorically get in his face about how he hurt former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s reputation.
Late in the nine o’clock hour, Maddow began pressing Comey on the three reasons he began to distance himself from Lynch’s leadership during the Clinton e-mail investigation. Those reasons were her insistence on using Clinton campaign talking points to describe the investigation as “a matter,” her clandestine tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton, and apparently “there's something that you very carefully describe as an unverified intelligence report suggesting that she had offered assurances to the Clinton campaign about the investigation…”
“Part of why you decided to do is the existence of the unverified intelligence document that could have cast doubt on her independence from the Clinton campaign, even though you didn’t think she had a problem,” She continued to preface before demanding to know: “Did you ever brief her on that and give her a chance to defend herself?” Comey wasn’t able to fully respond to the question.
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