"Whether you like Corrupt James Comey or not, and I can’t imagine too many people liking him, HE LIED!"

"It is not a complex lie, it’s a very simple, but IMPORTANT one. There is no way he can explain his way out of it. He is a Dirty Cop, and always has been, but he was just assigned a Crooked Joe Biden appointed Judge, so he’s off to a very good start. Nevertheless, words are words, and he wasn’t hedging or in dispute. He was very positive, there was no doubt in his mind about what he said, or meant by saying it. He left himself ZERO margin of error on a big and important answer to a question. He just got unexpectedly caught. James 'Dirty Cop' Comey was a destroyer of lives. He knew exactly what he was saying, and that it was a very serious and far reaching lie for which a very big price must be paid!"

Signed, "President DJT," on Truth Social, this morning.

What, precisely, is the supposedly simple statement Comey made and why is it supposedly now utterly clear that it was not only wrong but a lie?

The "simple" statement is actually an elaborate back-and-forth with Ted Cruz at a Senate hearing on  September 30, 2020:

"Why not indict McCabe on felony false-statements charges? That is the question being pressed by incensed Trump supporters."

"After all, the constitutional guarantee of equal justice under the law is supposed to mean that McCabe gets the same quality of justice afforded to the sad sacks pursued with unseemly zeal by McCabe’s FBI and Robert Mueller’s prosecutors. George Papadopoulos was convicted of making a trivial false statement about the date of a meeting. Roger Stone was convicted of obstruction long after the special counsel knew there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy, even though his meanderings did not impede the investigation in any meaningful way. And in the case of Michael Flynn’s false-statements conviction, as McCabe himself acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee, even the agents who interviewed him did not believe he intentionally misled them.... "

From "Why Wasn’t Andrew McCabe Charged?" by Andrew McCarthy (National Review).

"In 'Seven Days in May,' a popular novel from the early nineteen-sixties that became a movie, a cabal of military officers conspire to overthrow the President of the United States..."

"... whom they regard as unduly sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The story, along with such other Cold War fantasies as 'Fail Safe' and 'Dr. Strangelove,' belongs to a genre that shares certain assumptions and plot points. The President is a reasonable fellow, doing his best to insure the survival of the planet, and the villains are the defenders of the permanent bureaucracy, usually the military. Things don’t always end well in these sagas—to wit, the destruction of New York City, in 'Fail Safe,' and of civilization, in 'Strangelove'—but the underlying message is that the President always has the interests of the American people at heart. The genre received a nonfiction update last week, when Andrew McCabe published 'The Threat"... [about] eight days in May of 2017.... McCabe’s tale is like a photo negative of the Cold War stories. Now the contest pits a despotic and, at times, seemingly deranged President against shocked and horrified bureaucrats scrambling to safeguard the basic principles of our democracy."

Writes Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker.

I don't think Toobin meant to imply that "The Threat" is a work of fiction — and a cheesy one at that — a mere "popular novel," in the genre of "Cold War fantasies."

Did you watch that McCabe thing on "60 Minutes"?

I did.  I watched it very closely. With some meticulous rewinding and analysis (where McCabe declared Trump "disgusting" and it was hard to understand exactly why (Trump, campaigning, had weaponized a factoid from the Wall Street Journal)).

I thought the "60 Minutes" presentation followed a clever narrative arc, with a beginning that allowed McCabe to inflate himself, a middle that brought in his wife and complicated the story, and an ending that gave us so much reason to doubt his credibility that I said out loud, "This really isn't favorable to McCabe at all."

At first, I thought the reasons to mistrust McCabe should have been presented up front, so we could question his telling of the story as we went along, but in the end, I liked the narrative arc, which I think is typical of "60 Minutes." We're drawn in, and then things are not what they seemed, and we're challenged. Then, suddenly, it's that ticking clock on the screen. That's all you get. Figure it out!

Here's the full interview, with video and transcript. I'll just excerpt the text of the part we rewound and rewatched about 10 times:

But in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign, The Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined "Clinton Ally Aided FBI Wife." It was about Jill McCabe's funding the year before. The article noted, accurately, that her husband's role in the Clinton email investigation began months after she lost. But candidate Donald Trump seemed to conflate the two.

President Trump at Rally: It was just learned that one of the closest people to Hillary Clinton with long-standing ties to her husband and herself… gave more than $675,000 to the campaign of the spouse, the wife, of the top FBI official who helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton's illegal email server.

Scott Pelley: How do you feel when you see that?

Jill McCabe: Sick. Sick to my stomach.

Andrew McCabe: I think sickening is the right word. It's disgusting. To see the candidate for the presidency taking those lies and manipulating them for his own advantage, and then to hear you know, the chants and the boos of thousands of people who are just accepting those lies at face value, it's chilling.

My question was: What lies? And: How did Trump manipulate them? We even paused on the text of the WSJ article so we could read it (the "Clinton Ally" was Terry McAuliffe).

The best I came up with in answer to my question was that Jill McCabe received the $675,000 and lost her election before Andrew McCabe took on a role in the Hillary Clinton investigation, so when Clinton's ally gave the money to Jill, her husband was not yet in the position she had a huge interest having influence over. I don't think Andrew McCabe is saying the WSJ published lies, and the only "lies" I see in what Trump said is giving an impression about the time line.

I think Jill and Andrew are horrified at how effectively Trump weaponized the material. Of course he used it "for his own advantage"! Is that what Andrew McCabe is calling "manipulating"? Why isn't that just being a very effective candidate?

"McCabe Says Justice Officials Discussed Recruiting Cabinet Members to Push Trump Out of Office."

The NYT reports on an interview with Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director. According to McCabe, "top Justice Department officials were so alarmed by President Trump’s decision in May 2017 to fire James B. Comey, the bureau’s director, that they discussed whether to recruit cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office."

The interview (with Scott Pelley) is scheduled to run on "60 Minutes" this weekend, and McCabe is promoting a book. My first question is how serious was the discussion. All sorts of things are discussed in passing. Lots of people "discussed" the 25th Amendment in the early days of the Trump presidency, the idea being that Trump was mentally ill.

Mr. McCabe is the first person involved in these meetings who has spoken publicly about them. Mr. Pelley said, “They were counting noses. They were not asking cabinet members whether they would vote for or against removing the president, but they were speculating ‘This person would be with us, this person would not be,’ and they were counting noses in that effort....This was not perceived to be a joke,” Mr. Pelley added....

Funny that the key quotes come from Pelley, not McCabe.

Trump has tweeted this reaction:

Disgraced FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a “poor little Angel” when in fact he was a big part of the Crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax - a puppet for Leakin’ James Comey. I.G. report on McCabe was devastating. Part of “insurance policy” in case I won....

The NYT doesn't elaborate on why anyone could have seriously thought the 25th Amendment applied. Looking back to early 2017 in my archive, I see that a couple writers at The New Yorker were pushing the Trump-is-insane theory of the applicability of the 25th Amendment. On May 8, 2017, I pointed to Evan Osnos. Excerpt:

"Andrew McCabe was just offered a job by [my] congressman so he can get his full retirement. And it just might work."

WaPo reports.

“My offer of employment to Mr. McCabe is a legitimate offer to work on election security,” [said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.)]. “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of American democracy and both Republicans and Democrats should be concerned about election integrity.”...

The job doesn't matter so much as the fact that he's working within the federal government with the same retirement benefits until or after his 50th birthday. (Though this former official stressed that it would probably look more ethical if McCabe worked for at least a pay period rather than just one day.)