Pretty much sums up the whole witch hunt.
-------------------------------------------------
Conservatives torch Comey’s credibility ahead of Senate hearing
Washington will be riveted this week by the drama surrounding former FBI Director James Comey’s expected congressional testimony.
But Republicans elsewhere in the country say they couldn’t care less.
Interviews with GOP activists across the country, including around a dozen attendees at this weekend’s North Carolina Republican convention, reveal deep mistrust of Comey, who was investigating possible connections between Russia and the Trump campaign before the president fired him.
Comey, slated to appear before the Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, is also expected to respond to reports that Trump pressured him to give former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn a pass. Yet there is little Comey could say this week that would change how grassroots Republicans view the president.
“There’s nothing about Jim Comey that I trust,” said state Sen. Ron Rabin. “There’s nothing consistent about what he says.”
Asked whether Comey has any credibility, he offered a view shared by many Republican activists gathered at this airy waterfront convention center: “None. Zero.”
Nationally, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, operatives and donors have expressed alarm about the complicated, multifaceted issue of Russian involvement in an American election, some of which Comey is expected to speak to this week. Some, like Rep. Mike Simpson, a Republican of Idaho, have vouched for his credibility, especially given reports that he has contemporaneous notes from conversations with Trump.
But at this convention, which offered a snapshot of the Republican grassroots, many considered the broader Russia issue as, at best, a distraction from issues like health care and the economy. And others saw the swirling questions around Russia—including the Comey investigation and coming testimony—as pure partisanship driven by Democrats and the media to undermine the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s victory last November.
“The whole thing with Russia is nonsense,” says Jim Gannon, a GOP activist in North Carolina.
“They’re desperately trying to justify why Hillary Clinton lost other than saying Democratic policies aren’t acceptable to people,” said Gannon. “This whole thing is a pretty desperate attempt at partisan politics. ‘Wow, the Russians swung the election.’ What did they do, come and vote? No.”
U.S. intelligence experts, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, have been adamant that Moscow did in fact interfere with the 2016 campaign, and intelligence officials have said Russia pushed for hacking of Democratic officials’ emails. Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied this, saying in a recent interview with NBC’s Megyn Kelly that such an order could have come from anyone, including from Americans.
Allison Powers, an attendee who said she is the secretary of the Charlotte-area Union County GOP, was inclined to believe him.
“Putin suggested Russia’s being made a scapegoat for hacking,” she said. “That’s what I think too.”
Long-time U.S. government officials—the “deep state,” she calls them—“don’t want Trump. They’re trying to mess him up.”
Others didn’t go that far, but a number of people questioned whether Russia had really sought to interfere with the U.S. election.
Back in North Carolina, some convention attendees, such as Tom Fyle—a city councilman from Wilson, N.C., near Raleigh—said they would also be listening to the Comey testimony. But they didn’t expect to learn much.
“The facts,” Fyle said, when asked what he’d be watching for.
But he made clear that he doesn’t believe Comey is a trustworthy source of such information: “I don’t know that he’s credible with facts. He hasn’t been credible so far.”
