The Comey gap
The Comey gap

Everybody over 56 years old likely remembers the 18 ½ minute gap in Richard Nixon's White House Watergate tapes after Nixon had ordered erasures to hide things he said concerning Watergate.  In the current Comey craze of testimony, there’s a 105 ½ hour gap in James Comey’s testimony that proves that critical parts of Comey’s testimony is at best materially false, and, at worst, highly perjurious with the intent of committing crimes against the United States. 

That 105 ½ hour gap is the time between when President Trump on Friday morning “tweeted” that “James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” and when Comey alleged in his recent Senate Intelligence Committee testimony that he “woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation.” 

Between 9:32 Friday morning and let’s guess 3 am that next Monday night, there are approximately 105 and ½ hours.  In short, Comey’s Senate testimony states that it took James B. Comey, Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the United States of America, 105 ½ hours after President Trump’s “tapes” tweet to realize “that there might be corroboration” of his memos. This is so ludicrous that it exposes his entire testimony as a web of perjury.

As a preface, this essay is not going to vet the already reported grave chronology inconsistency in Comey’s “memo” testimony.

Instead, ,first, let’s examine the exact documentary record regarding this 105 ½ hour gap.

President Trump’s tweet at 8:26 AM on 12 May 2017 read:

“James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Next, James B. Comey, Jr.'s Senate Intelligence Committee testimony under Republican Senator Susan Collins read as follows:

“COLLINS: And finally, did you show copies of your memos to anyone outside of the Department of Justice?

COMEY: Yes.

COLLINS: And to whom did you show copies?

COMEY: I asked — the president tweeted on Friday, after I got fired, that I better hope there’s no tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape.

And my judgment was, I needed to get that out into the public square. And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself, for a variety of reasons. But I asked him to, because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. And so I asked a close friend of mine to do it.

COLLINS: And was that Mr. Wittes?

COMEY: No, no.

COLLINS: Who was that?

COMEY: A good friend of mine who’s a professor at Columbia Law School.

COLLINS: Thank you.”

Let’s examine Comey’s 105 ½ hour gap on its face.  Can anyone believe Comey woke up in the middle of Monday night 105 ½ hours after Trump’s Friday tweet because until Monday night “it didn’t dawn on [Comey] originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation.”  Can anyone believe that it took the former Director of the FBI 105 ½ hours after Trump’s tweet to have a “dawning” Eureka moment of understanding that there “might be corroboration for our conversation”!  Either Comey 100% lied, or Comey is an idiot.  Since, Comey is clearly not an idiot, it is logically and practically inescapable that Comey is lying about the whole incident.  And his entire testimony on every issue must be viewed as gravely suspect.

Why would Comey  say “I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape.”  If Comey’s real-time contemporaneous memos were truly accurate and 100% truthful, why would Comey even need to have “corroboration” to be true? Comey was apparently already more than willing to orally, ex post facto, testify to many things in the past that he didn’t need extra “corroboration” for.  Here, a real-time document is generally, in and of itself, more probative than ex post facto testimony of past event.  So, is Comey saying if Trump had never tweeted about “tapes,” that Comey would never have disclosed the memos?

More to the point, why didn’t Comey, upon his firing, immediately give the memos to his immediate superior, the Deputy Attorney General as vital governmental evidence?  Or, alternatively, why didn’t Comey immediately send his memos to the Senate Intelligence Committee when they requested his testimony?  One would have thought his supposedly “unclassified” memos would have been vital to the Senate committee’s preparation for his testimony.

In conclusion, Comey’s 105 ½ gap proves that the critical core “story” of Comey’s Senate testimony is anomaly.  This is not a he said versus she said” this a “Comey said versus Comey said.”  Something is very, very wrong with Comey’s testimony.  And, there must be an immediate criminal investigation into every aspect of it including subpoenas for Comey’s computers on which he wrote those memos.  The FBI must examine the meta data of those Comey memos and see what and when the memos were written and how they were changed over time.