Who do you believe?

President trump has now called James Comey a liar, and he has volunteered to testify under oath to refute what James Comey said while he was under oath.

The question now is which one of these two men do you believe.

The president?

"There’s a high bar to accusing someone of committing a “lie,” and we don’t do it lightly.

A lie isn’t just a false statement. It’s a false statement whose speaker knows it’s false. In these instances, the president — or his administration — have clear reason to know otherwise. Reporters are understandably cautious about using the word — some never do, because it requires speculating on what someone is thinking. The cases we call "lies" are ones where we think it's fair to make that call: Trump is saying something that contradicts clear and widely published information that we have reason to think he's seen. This list also includes bullshit: speech that is — in its academic definition — "unconnected to a concern with the truth.

trump's words: "The NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence electoral process."

Lie: Trump posted the above tweet just hours after FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers began testifying about Russian interference in the 2016 election in favor of Trump. Comey testified that the FBI came to believe that Russia was using “active measures” to hurt the Clinton campaign and help the Trump campaign.

“They wanted to hurt our democracy, hurt her and help him,” Comey said. “Putin hated Secretary Clinton so much that the flip side of that coin was that he had a clear preference for the person running against the person he hated so much.”

Trump's tweet — and the video clip included with it — is a selective portion of the hearing where Nunes was asking Rogers if he had evidence Russia changed vote tallies in specific states.

Trump's words: “We got 306 because people came out and voted like they’ve never seen before so that’s the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan,” Trump said during a news conference on Feb. 16.

Lie: Trump actually won 304 electoral votes, because two electors refused to cast their vote for him when the Electoral College met.

Several former presidents have also received more electoral votes than Trump. George H. W. Bush won with 426 electoral votes in 1988. Bill Clinton won 370 votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996, and Barack Obama won with 365 votes in 2008.

When a reporter at the news conference called Trump out for spreading false information, the president said, "Well, I was just given that information. I don’t know. I was just given…We had a very big margin."

Trump's words: Trump tweeted on Sunday, "While on FAKE NEWS @CNN, Bernie Sanders was cut off for using the term fake news to describe the network. They said technical difficulties!"

Senator Sanders was on CNN's Erin Burnett Out Front on Feb. 10, discussing Trump's travel ban and controversy surrounding National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, among other topics.

Lie: During the interview, Burnett showed Sanders a clip of Trump responding to a reporter's question following news that Flynn called the Russian ambassador to the US before the inauguration to discuss previously-imposed sanctions. In the clip, Trump says he has "not seen the report."

Burnett then asked Sanders if it's a problem that the president did not know about the report, in which Sanders criticized Trump for dismissing negative news as "fake news."

CNN PR tweeted a transcript of the interview, which reads:

Burnett: "He says he knows nothing about it, hasn't seen any of these reports. Is that a problem?"

Sanders: "Well, I don't know, maybe he was watching CNN fake news, what do you think?"

Burnett: "You don't buy it?"

Sanders: "That was a joke."

Burnett: "I know it was a joke. I'm saying, you don't buy what he said, obviously?"

Right after Burnett acknowledged that Sanders was joking when he called CNN "fake news," the audio cut out and CNN went to a commercial break. When the show returned, Burnett picked up her interview where they left off and Sanders went on to say it's "not a joke" when "you have a president who attacks people in the media who make critical remarks of him — which is what their jobs is — as providing 'fake news.'"

rump's words: Trump again claimed there was widespread voter fraud during the November election, this time telling senators “thousands” of people were bussed in from Massachusetts to vote in New Hampshire.

Trump made the unsubstantiated claims in a closed-door meeting with 10 senators Thursday to discuss his Supreme Court nomination, Neil Gorsuch, Politico reported.

Trump blamed “thousands” of people who were “brought in on buses” from Massachusetts to vote illegally in New Hampshire during the meeting, which was also reported by the Associated Press.

Lie: Officials at New Hampshire’s secretary of state office, US Attorney’s Office, and Massachusetts’ attorney general’s office told BuzzFeed News there was no evidence to support the president’s claim.

“We have not seen any evidence of busloads of out-of-state voters coming across the border to vote in New Hampshire elections,” David Scanlan, deputy secretary of state for New Hampshire, said. Read more here.

rump's words: Trump tweeted at 6:57 a.m., "Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who never fought in Vietnam when he said for years he had (major lie), now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?"

At 8:17 a.m., Trump added, "Chris Cuomo, in this interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave 'service' in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!"

Blumenthal was interviewed on CNN Thursday morning, following his statement from the previous day, in which he said the president's nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Gorsuch, said Trump's recent attacks on the judiciary are "disheartening" and "demoralizing."

Lie: Cuomo asked that exact question. His question to Blumenthal was, "What is your response to the president of the United States, who says you should not be believed because you misrepresented your military record in the past?" [Source]

There is lots more where that came from, but I think you get the picture.

James Comey?

James Brien Comey Jr. (born December 14, 1960) is an American lawyer who served as the seventh Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from September 2013 until May 2017.^[2] Comey has been a registered Republican for most of his life, but is now independent.

Comey was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from January 2002 to December 2003, and subsequently the United States Deputy Attorney General from December 2003 to August 2005 in the administration of President George W. Bush. Comey appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to be the Special Counsel to head the grand jury investigation into the Plame affair after Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself.

In August 2005, Comey left the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and became general counsel and senior vice president of Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Maryland.^[3] In 2010, he became general counsel at Bridgewater Associates, based in Westport, Connecticut. In early 2013, he left Bridgewater to become a Senior Research Scholar and Hertog Fellow on National Security Law at Columbia Law School. He served on the Board of Directors of HSBC Holdings until July 2013.^[4]

In September 2013, Comey was appointed Director of the FBI by President Barack Obama.^[5] In that capacity, he was responsible for overseeing the FBI's investigation of the Hillary Clinton email controversy. His role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, particularly with regard to his public communications, was highly controversial.^[6] His decisions have been regarded by a number of analysts, including Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, to have likely cost Clinton the election.... [Source]

 

I think we have read enough.