Fox News host Sean Hannity said former Attorney General Loretta Lynch “threw James Comey right under the bus.”
In his opening monologue, Hannity said either Lynch or former FBI Director James Comey lied to Congress about a conversation they had about the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
“Former attorney general under Barack Obama, that’s right, [Loretta] Lynch, threw James Comey right under the bus and told Congress she never asked the embattled FBI director to refer to the Clinton criminal investigation as ‘a matter.’ Comey said just the opposite. One of them is lying,” Hannity said in his opening monologue Monday evening.
“Who lied to Congress? Who committed the crime under oath? It would be a serious violation,” he added.
A flurry of transcripts of closed-door testimony were released Monday evening by House Judiciary Committee ranking member Doug Collins, R-Ga., including one with Lynch late last year.
In that transcript, she denied to congressional investigators that she ever instructed Comey to minimize the Clinton email investigation by urging him to call it a “matter” instead of an “investigation.”
That clashes with what Comey testified to Congress under oath in 2017. He told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017 that Lynch “directed” him to call the investigation a “matter” during a September 2015 meeting. Comey brought it up in the context of describing his decision to do a press conference in the summer of 2016, while Clinton was a candidate for president, in which he recommended no criminal charges against Clinton but called her handling of classified information “extremely careless.”
The transcript release comes as Comey faces intense scrutiny on another front. Last week, Fox News reported on the existence of a late 2016 email chain in which Comey told his staff that CIA Director John Brennan insisted that British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s unverified research on President Trump’s ties to Russia — calling it the “crown material” — be included in the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, a former CIA official “put the blame squarely on Comey.”
