White House counselor Kellyanne Conway Friday cast doubt on former FBI Director James Comey's upcoming Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, pointing out that in his last testimony he made several statements that "had to be corrected almost immediately."
"We'll watch with the rest of the world," Conway told ABC News "Good Morning America" anchor George Stephanopoulos. "The last time he testified under oath, the FBI had to scurry to correct it. He was off by hundreds of thousands in his count, his sworn testimony count of the number of information, the number of emails Huma Abedin sent to her husband Anthony Weiner."
However, Comey's testimony should prove to be a "clarifying moment," because "it's more important to have somebody testify under oath, frankly, than to have his friends and his former colleagues out there speaking to the media, not under oath."
She also would not comment if President Donald Trump would invoke executive privilege to stop Comey's testimony.
"The president will make that decision, but, look, we want to refer everybody to what Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said about James Comey," Conway said. "He went and looked at the investigation about the way Mr. Comey handled Hillary Clinton's e-mail investigation, and he concluded that it really hurt the morale and the integrity of the department."
Trump, however, has said he decided to fire Comey before Rosenstein wrote a memo about him, and Conway conceded that Trump had been considering that for a while.
"Director Comey, in his goodbye letter, clearly said he has long believed a president has the right to fire an FBI director for any reason or for no reason, so that is the president's right," said Conway. "In addition and independent of that, his deputy attorney general whose job it is to oversee the FBI director, had concluded much the same thing. He said that the morale and the integrity of the department had been compromised."
Conway on Friday also discussed news reports concerning Trump senior adviser Jared Kushner's meeting with a Russian banker, saying he's already said he'll be willing to share any information he has on the topic.
"He's been willing to cooperate and he's willing to go and say what he knows, but I think there's so much speculation out there and usually gone through a negative lens," said Conway. "Let's give him a chance to say what he knows."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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