Comey testimony: Trump team denies accusations, tries to turn tables on ex-FBI boss

President Trump's legal team shot back Thursday at James Comey's Senate testimony, defending the president in a brawny statement against the fired FBI director's more damaging claims and asserting Comey himself could now be in legal jeopardy for his admission he'd leaked details of "privileged" conversations.

Trump's personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, also said Comey's testimony backed up Trump on key points -- affirming that the president "never sought to impede" the Russia probe, and that while he was FBI director, Comey told Trump several times he wasn't the subject of an investigation.

The president's lawyer issued the rebuttal in a written statement that he read to reporters during a brief post-hearing appearance.

The statement sought to shield Trump and shift scrutiny onto Comey, who on Thursday delivered dramatic testimony that stopped short of accusing Trump of obstruction of justice but made numerous other allegations.

Kasowitz tried to rebut them one by one.

Despite Comey's claims to the contrary, he emphasized Trump “never, in form or substance, directed or suggested” that Comey drop an investigation into ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Kasowitz also denied Trump asked Comey for a pledge of loyalty, contradicting Comey's story and setting up a "he said-he said" between the former FBI boss and the president.

Kasowitz also cast doubt on Comey’s explanation as to why he decided to leak a memo describing the Flynn conversation after Trump had fired him as FBI director.

“Although Mr. Comey testified he only leaked the memos in response to a tweet, the public record reveals that the New York Times was quoting from these memos the day before the referenced tweet, which belies Mr. Comey's excuse for this unauthorized disclosure of privileged information and appears to be entirely retaliatory,” the statement said.

The New York Times wrote its first story about private conversations between Comey and Trump on May 11, though the Times made no mention of a memo existing to allegedly substantiate the encounter. The following day Trump sent an infamous tweet implying he had recorded the discussion himself: "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"

Comey suggested that tweet prompted him to leak his notes. Four days later the first story appeared in the press citing an alleged Comey memo.

Kasowitz, meanwhile, pointedly raised the question Thursday of whether Comey's leak amounts to a legal problem for him: “We will leave it to the appropriate authorities to determine whether this leak should be investigated along with all those others being investigated.”

Though Trump did not tweet or make a direct statement about Comey’s testimony, he did reference fighting back during a speech he gave to religious conservatives as Comey’s testimony was wrapping up.

“They will lie, they will obstruct, they will spread their hatred and their prejudice, but we will not back down from doing what is right,” Trump said. “We will fight and win, and we will have an unbelievable future. An unbelievable future. And it’s going to be together.”

Though Trump, a well-established prolific tweeter, has not sent a message from his account since Wednesday morning, he was certainly represented on the social media network. The Republican National Committee tweeted from its @GOP account, often hashtagging posts “#bigleaguetruth.”

“So according to Comey, @POTUS never asked to stop the investigation and Russia didn’t change a single vote. Good to know. #BigLeagueTruth,” one message read.

One of Trump’s children, Donald Trump Jr., was also tweeting a rapid-response defense of his dad.

Writing about Comey’s assertion that Trump intimated Comey should drop the Flynn investigation, Trump Jr. wrote: “Knowing my father for 39 years when he ‘orders or tells’ you to do something there is no ambiguity, you will know exactly what he means.”

Sen. John McCain’s bizarre questioning of Comey

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was the last senator to question former FBI director James B. Comey at Thursday's Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. Nearing the end of more than 2½ hours of questioning, McCain focused his line on two FBI inquiries: the 2016 investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state and the 2017 investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election.

But several of his questions confused viewers, and seemingly Comey himself, and he occasionally was incoherent. He referred to “President Comey,” and at times looked confused and frustrated with Comey's answers. Viewers clearly thought it was notable; Twitter announced it was the most-tweeted moment of the hearing.

“In the case of Hillary Clinton, you made the statement that there wasn't sufficient evidence to bring a suit against her, although it had been very careless in their behavior, but you did reach a conclusion in that case that it was not necessary to further pursue her,” McCain's line of questioning began. “Yet at the same time, in the case of Mr. [Trump], you said that there was not enough information to make a conclusion. Tell me the difference between your conclusion as far as former secretary Clinton is concerned, and Mr. Trump.”


Comey answered that the Clinton email investigation was a completed, closed investigation at the time he announced in July that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against her, while the Russia investigation is still underway and could be for some time.

But McCain wasn't satisfied. He seemed to be arguing that Comey exonerated Clinton, in a sense, but left an investigation looming over President Trump, setting a double standard.

Comey again tried to explain that he discussed the findings of the Clinton investigation only after it was completed.

“That investigation was going on. This investigation was going on. You reached separate conclusions,” McCain said. Comey explained, for the third time, that the Clinton investigation was about an email server and was concluded in July.

That's when it got really weird.

“You're gonna have to help me out here,” McCain said. Comey replied that he was confused. In the video above, you can watch the entire exchange. But it boiled down to one point.

“I think it's hard to reconcile, in one case you reach a complete conclusion, and on the other side you have not,” McCain said. “I think that's a double standard there, to tell you the truth.”

Well, of course. The Clinton email investigation ended more than 11 months ago, while the Russia investigation continues. It was a bizarre argument from McCain, who appeared annoyed with Comey. Was he arguing that Comey should publicly exonerate Trump before the Russia investigation is finished? Was he arguing that Comey didn't investigate Clinton vigorously enough? Was he arguing that the FBI applied different standards to the two candidates?

It's hard to say, but McCain seemed to be trying to blunt the effect of Comey's testimony about Trump.

That's made all the more odd by the fact that, since Election Day (and even going back to the 2016 campaign), McCain has been one of the Senate Republicans most critical of Trump and his administration.

McCain later released a statement, joking that “maybe going forward I shouldn’t stay up late watching the Diamondbacks night games.”

The rest of the statement reads:

What I was trying to get at was whether Mr. Comey believes that any of his interactions with the President rise to the level of obstruction of justice. In the case of Secretary Clinton’s emails, Mr. Comey was willing to step beyond his role as an investigator and state his belief about what ‘no reasonable prosecutor’ would conclude about the evidence. I wanted Mr. Comey to apply the same approach to the key question surrounding his interactions with President Trump — whether or not the President’s conduct constitutes obstruction of justice. While I missed an opportunity in today’s hearing, I still believe this question is important, and I intend to submit it in writing to Mr. Comey for the record.

'Too easy' to track mobile phones because of security weakness, expert warns

Mobile phones users have "insufficient protections" from stalkers, experts from the University of Oxford have warned.

Research assistant Piers O'Hanlon told attendees of the BSides London security conference that there were a range of ways stalkers can track devices.

"The current security deployments make it too easy to perform these attacks," he explained.

He told Sky News: "There are problems I discovered in the way that mobile phones communicate over WiFi that means that the phones can potentially be tracked by unknown parties, and be tracked by their unique mobile identifier."

Currently, smartphones hand out their identities freely to any phone network base station that requests it.

Mr O'Hanlon said that without spending much, someone can "set up one of these fake access points, and then get your phone to connect to it".

Most of the attacks that he described to the conference did this using WiFi to "catch" the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), a 15-digit number which uniquely identifies phones and their subscriptions to the network.

These potential stalkers "might be criminal outfits, potentially, trying to track the movements of people of interest.

"It could potentially be used by terrorists," Mr O'Hanlon said.

There is a limit to how much most people want to know about mobile security, he said.

"Generally they need to run their updates, especially if they're running banking apps or if they have personal information on their phone

"But there's not really much else that an end-user can do."

The security issues he highlighted have to be tackled by mobile firms, he added.

"I contacted Apple, Google, Microsoft and BlackBerry, and it's kind of in that order that they actually responded and were proactive in trying to address it," Mr O'Hanlon said.

"Apple specifically developed a feature into iOS 10 to improve the situation.

"Google initially were not so worried but then when I told them that Apple were concerned they eventually said 'Okay, let's have another look'."

Sky News has contacted the companies mentioned for comment.

Qatar-based TV channel Al Jazeera 'hit by cyberattack'

Qatar-based TV channel Al Jazeera has claimed all its systems, websites and social media accounts have been hit by a cyberattack.

The company said it was experiencing "systematic and continual hacking attempts" which were "gaining intensity and taking various forms".

But a senior employee told the Reuters news agency the international broadcaster is "combatting" the onslaught and all its systems are still "operational".

The claim of a cyberattack comes as Al Jazeera is at the centre of Qatar's row with fellow Arab states over allegations the country supports terrorism.

Al Jazeera is owned by Qatar's government and funded by the Gulf state's ruling Al Thani family, prompting accusations it is used to promote the country's soft power around the world.

The broadcaster has often proved an irritant to its fellow states in the region, with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) - leading actors in the ongoing diplomatic spat - all blocking Al Jazeera's website in their countries last month.

The three countries, as well as Yemen and Bahrain, this week accused Doha of destabilising the region by backing extremist groups, including Islamic State.

The five states have broken off diplomatic ties with Qatar and halted all land, air and sea traffic to the country in a coordinated move.

Qatari citizens living in any of the five territories have been given two weeks to leave.

What Trump can learn from Shonda Rhimes about how to tweet the Comey hearing

President Trump may be convinced that “The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out.” As usual, that’s wrong on a couple of levels: It’s not so much that those of us in the press are scared that Trump will supplant us as we worry that the cost in global upheaval isn’t a price worth paying for a candid look inside Trump’s brain. And though I think he’s unlikely to listen to advice from the“Fake News of … washpost,” I do have a suggestion for Trump. If he decides to tweet his responses to former FBI director James Comey’s congressional testimony in real time Thursday, he should learn from the master of using Twitter to comment on live TV, a woman he could not have less in common with: Shonda Rhimes.

If Trump tweeted himself to the presidency, Rhimes has used Twitter to build a bona fide television empire of the sort Trump could only dream of for “The Apprentice.” Kerry Washington, the star of Rhimes’s “Scandal,” has said the cast and Rhimes’s live-tweeting of the show during its first season was critical to its renewal. The opportunity to watch the people involved in making an episode comment on it live wasn’t something that viewers could replicate by streaming the show later. Tweeting through each hour of “Scandal” turned those episodes into major, multiplatform events. And by making themselves available on Twitter, the cast of the show created a special bond with the show’s fans.

Ultimately, this strategy was successful enough that it became the anchor of a whole night of ABC’s program: Dubbed #TGIT for “Thank God It’s Thursday,” the three-hour block of Rhimes’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal” and “How to Get Away With Murder” became a social-media-fueled version of NBC’s “Must See TV” programming from the 1990s. Keeping audiences in their seats, and making sure they were intensely engaged with what they were watching, was a win for ABC, for Rhimes — who has become one of the most powerful showrunners in broadcast television — and for the advertisers who air spots during her shows.

Trump faces a more complicated calculation (if, indeed, he’s capable of weighing the risks and benefits of this approach). Unlike the people involved in “Scandal,” it’s not really in Trump’s interest to draw more attention to the live broadcasts of Comey’s hearing. And it’s definitelynot good for Trump to do anything that makes the audience for it feel more invested in Comey as a character in this spectacle.

Instead, Trump wants to tear down his former FBI director. He can dispute Comey live if he wants to, and if it would make him feel good to do so. But live-tweeting Comey’s testimony also risks that audiences will be able to see any disparity between Trump’s and Comey’s respective self-presentation and the substance of their arguments. That’s not even to mention the fact that a rage-fueled tweetstorm from the president could ultimately end up getting cited in court decisions or investigations.

But if Trump is hell-bent on picking an online fight with Comey, he should at least follow Rhimes’s model for how to do it.

What makes her live-tweeting a treat is that Rhimes explains how she feels about the scenes she’s put on screen, what she was thinking when she wrote them, and how she feels that plot developments tie into or allude to previous developments in her fevered soap opera. Rather than merely lobbing charges of “Sad!” or “low-energy,” Trump should explain his own intentions and feelings in the interactions Comey describes. If he thinks there are facts or context that Comey doesn’t bring up, he should explain them.

To be clear, I don’t think it would be wise for Trump to do any of these things, from either a political or a legal perspective. In fact, I believe live-tweeting Comey’s testimony is a disastrous idea for the president. But who am I to tell the president what to do? If Trump is determined to conduct his presidency with all the frenetic plot twists and back-stabbing of a Shonda Rhimes drama, he should at least learn how to promote the Trump Show from the best in the business.

Can USAID defeat ISIL?

The recipients of US foreign aid have received destruction and development in a single package, writes Zakaria [Akhtar Soomro/Reuters]
by
Rafia Zakaria

@RafiaZakaria

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney and author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan; and Veil.

Last month, as Donald Trump danced with Saudi princes and scolded European leaders, the United States Agency for Aid and Development (USAID) released its budgetary request for the 2018 fiscal year. The document, which presents an argument of sorts to American politicians for why it is necessary to commit money for international development, makes for interesting reading.

The very first argument listed by the agency is that the requested money will enable USAID to "help defeat ISIS and other terrorist organizations, threats and networks". In the short explanation appended, USAID claims that the $2.5bn being requested will permit the agency to "target the root causes of violent extremism, rebuild economic opportunities and good governance

It all sounds very good and admittedly it feels harsh to berate the well-intentioned bureaucrats at USAID for their attempt to tie their budgetary requests to what the Trump administration has decided will be its number one goal. What sounds good in intention, however, is rarely good in actuality. So it is with this latest claim, one that belies all existing evidence that pairing bombings with development agendas is wasteful at best and a decrepit example of neo-imperialist deception at worst.

Bombing one corner of a country while doling out development dollars in other parts not only fails to accomplish development goals, it taints development programmes. Women's education, childhood vaccination, even better roads become associated with selling out and caving in, goodies paid for in the lives of dead fellow citizens.
Nullifying development goals

Examples of this dynamic abound in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the largest recipients of US development aid. In Afghanistan, the site of USAID's last attempt to defeat terror with development, millions of dollars were wasted when USAID went to war with the Taliban.

In 2015, the agency implemented the Rural Stabilization Programs, aimed at helping the Afghan Government to reach into "unstable" areas and build local governance capacity. "Unstable" here referred to, among other things, areas where there was significant Taliban activity. Following implementation of the programme, an oversight agency was tasked with reviewing whether the USAID programmes had accomplished their goal.

READ MORE: How US security aid to PA sustains Israel's occupation

Their report, compiled from data from hundreds of districts, found that stability was actually lower in those villages that had received USAID support. In addition to the fact that the villages that received no aid from USAID were better off in stability, the report also found that there was actually increased support for the Taliban in the areas that had been the recipients of USAID stabilisation funds. The programme, which cost more than $300m, is scheduled to continue until February 2018.

If the language of its budgetary request is any evidence, for USAID development seems only a secondary goal, while alignment with the ISIL-crushing strategic priorities of the Trump administration is a primary one.

The results reveal the truth that most people in conflict zones already know: bombing one portion of the country and providing stabilisation funding to another not only nullifies development goals but actually helps terrorist recruitment. At the core of the issue, however, lies the central question of whether development aid can and should be an instrument of foreign policy and military goals.

Most in the United States, of administrations past and present, not only support such a marriage, they insist that it can be a harmonious one. In their view, the US is committed to a free market economy and to democracy, so it should invest development dollars in creating more societies in its own image.

The premise seems unproblematic in theory, an easy statement of purpose that may very likely be workable. In practice, however, post-9/11 development dollars disbursed by USAID have been accompanied by military interventions. The recipients have received destruction and development in a single package.

This can be seen in the headlines from the same week in which USAID released its budgetary request to Congress. On May 25, only two days after USAID released its budgetary request, a Pentagon investigation found that a US air strike that targeted a building in the Iraqi city of Mosul in March had killed over 100 civilians - the largest number killed in a single incident since 2014.

The US had initially denied that it had undertaken any strikes at all in Mosul. Nothing was said even when locals reported that nearly 200 people had been killed by the bomb. Two long months had to pass before the Pentagon admitted that the US did in fact strike the building, that the strike took place in a very crowded area of the city and that, yes, a large number of civilians, people already pummelled by the incursion of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), had died.

READ MORE: Trump budget - UN sounds alarm over foreign aid cuts

The news of the strike and the "accidental" killing of more than a hundred civilians is relevant to the discussion of USAID and aid in general, because it points to exactly the sort of actions the US attempts to cover up with development activity.
Aid as 'bribe'

The US sees no disconnect between bombing one portion of the country (and inevitably killing civilians) and showering aid projects on another and imagining the pain from lost lives to be thus extinguishable. Receiving populations do not buy this transactional crossing out of pain with projects; they are smart enough to assess the cost of a school or a health clinic or a road in comparison to the lives of countrymen they have lost. It is a grisly calculus and its macabre nature betrays the truth that militarised aid, aid as a function of a super-power's strategic interests, is in reality a bribe and not aid at all.

To achieve development goals, actual uplift of societies, actual improvement of governance, commitment must be to development first and accomplishment of strategic and other objectives last. As the example of USAID and the Rural Stabilization Programs in Afghanistan exposes that people, poor and desperate as they may be, know when you are trying to buy their allegiance and most won't sell it.

USAID does not agree. If the language of its budgetary request is any evidence, for USAID development seems only a secondary goal, while alignment with the ISIL-crushing strategic priorities of the Trump administration is a primary one. Facing a large budgetary cut and a re-organisation that would place it within the US Department of State rather than as an independent agency, USAID bureaucrats have decided to bow before the administration and say what is necessary to save their jobs. The loser in this equation is development itself, a goal that was already becoming marginal because of the post 9/11 militarisation of US development aid and that is now completely abandoned in the rage-filled era of Trump.

Donald Trump doesn’t have 110 million people following him on social media

During the daily press briefing at the White House on Tuesday, press secretary Sean Spicer was asked about President Trump’s tweet earlier in the day claiming that the media was trying to get him to stop tweeting. (We very much are not.)

Wasn’t it the case, Spicer was asked, that Trump often does himself more harm than good with his from-the-hip tweeting?

“The president is the most effective messenger on his agenda,” Spicer replied. “I think his use of social media — he now has a collective total of close to 110 million people across different platforms — gives him an opportunity to speak straight to the American people, which has proved to be a very, very effective tool.”

One can debate whether Trump’s Twitter feed has been terribly effective at making him successful, post-election. But one cannot debate the assertion that Trump has 110 million people following him on social media, because he doesn’t.

Trump has at least two accounts on four of the biggest social media platforms. Combined, those accounts have about 93.1 million followers. Here they are, in descending order of number of followers. (All figures are as of writing.)
@realdonaldtrump on Twitter, 31,723,753 followers
DonaldTrump on Facebook, 22,380,849 followers
@POTUS on Twitter, 18,550,517 followers
WhiteHouse on Facebook, 8,249,626 followers
realdonaldtrump on Instagram, 6,973,811 followers
whitehouse on Instagram, 3,588,304 followers
POTUS on Facebook, 1,684,255 followers
potus on Instagram, 3,877 followers

Trump’s got accounts on Snapchat, too: realdonaldtrump and whitehouse. Snapchat doesn’t release public figures about the number of followers.

Clearly, 93.1 million is a smaller number than 110 million. So where do those other 17-odd million come from? Some come from Snapchat, but generally, it’s not clear. The term “social media” is nebulous. Does YouTube count? Trump’s account there has about 109,000 followers. What about Reddit? The virulent pro-Trump community r/The_Donald claims 6 million subscribers, but that’s not social media, and that figure should be taken with a grain of salt.

But even if we manage to cobble together some number that gets close to 110 million, there are two very good reasons that Trump’s not followed by 110 million people. First, a lot of those people follow multiple accounts across those networks and, second, some followers are robots.

This latter point seized the public’s imagination last week as rumors that Trump was buying Twitter followers were rampant. (Trump saw an uptick in his follower count, but not by the millions, and there’s no indicator that anything untoward was happening.) But those rumors centered around the idea that an army of “bots” — that is, automated accounts driven by code, not people — was being created to … do something nefarious. People dutifully plugged Trump’s Twitter accounts into tools that try to estimate how many fake accounts followed Trump and determined that perhaps half of his followers fit that description.

It’s important here to interject with two other important points. First of all, “bots” play the role in the public imagination that “atomic energy” played in 1950s comic books. It’s this sort of vaguely understood thing that’s generally assumed to be bad, and the negative effects of “bots” are blown way out of proportion. Bots are our modern boogeyman, and we tend to overinflate their existence and impact. That includes those “are my followers bots?” tools, which just look at how often people have tweeted and when their accounts were created and so on, and are therefore not necessarily a good guide to how many of the accounts actually aren’t driven by humans.

That said, there are certainly thousands or millions of followers of the @realdonaldtrump account who are actually automated accounts. There are also any number of followers that are tied to businesses or tied back to the same individual. For example, I have probably a dozen Twitter accounts tied to my name, since I make little bots like @trumphop, which automatically retweets old Trump tweets. Lots of other people have multiple accounts,

Which loops us back to the first point. If you’re active on political Twitter, you probably follow both @realdonaldtrump and @POTUS. You may follow both Trump and the White House on Facebook. Trump fans almost certainly follow him on both Twitter and Facebook, and probably Instagram, too. It’s very fair to assume that at least half of the followers on Trump’s social media accounts also follow one of his other accounts — which would mean that, instead of 93.1 million people following him, the number is closer to 47 million.

But let’s be more generous than that and assume that not everyone follows him on at least two of those accounts. Let’s assume that only a third do. That would mean that about 62.3 million people follow him on social media — or about one person for every vote he got last year. And many of those people live outside the United States or are bots.

In short, Spicer’s count of how many people are tracking Trump on social media is clearly inflated. But then, this is the guy whose first day on the job was spent defending the claim that 1.5 million people attended Trump’s inauguration.

Maybe Spicer’s just bad at math.