On a scale of 1-10 how likely was it that Trump, Comey, and Putin were in cahoots?

.


But, I seriously doubt Comey and Putin were communicating together.

That would be an automatic 20+ year prison sentence for an Intel Director to do that.


.

Comey highly unlikely to be directly supporting Putin.

He was trying to save face within the FBI and preserve his legacy. The Repub type agents were stomping mad at him for not suggesting charges (even though the review team voted unanimously against charges). Resignations were piling up on his desk and people were shunning him. He HAD thought his legacy was so great that his name might be on the new building but it suddenly went poof.

This isn't meant to give him an out. The press conference alone was way out of bounds.

I have no doubt that Trump and his team were working with/for Russian interests. Trump owes them collectively lots of money and from an article I read here yesterday he could very well be their money laundering agent.

Such violations shouldn't even be tolerated in a city council race. Comey's meddling hurt Hillary and us more than Putin's meddling. And the meddling of the latter can even be expected.

that's called "achieving notoriety".

i agree that there was that backdrop at fbi, that there were plenty on the rabid right both inside and outside the fbi that were pissed at him for dropping the case against hillary.

but what he did only redeems him in the eyes of people who put hyper-partisanship way, way, way over law, principle, ethics, justice, etc. his last-minute move hurt hillary politically but did nothing to advance any sense of justice in the case against her, and it swayed an election affecting the entire country for the sake of balancing the scales against a single target.


no. he did it because he knew that what he had was gold, that it was worth a ton of money and celebrity for him within the republican community.

so, yeah, maybe he was motivated by losing his place in the pantheon of fbi legends, but he wasn't trying to redeem himself in that area. he was carving out for himself a different legacy, in a community that only cares about partisan crap.

However, taking deliberate measures to achieve the same result.

The "Gang of Five" as I see it:

1. Vladamir Putin
2. James Comey
3. Julian Assage
4. Paul Manafort
5. Donald Trump