This is the Cato Dilly Podcast for Friday, June 9th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

The subtext of James Comi's testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee may be that

there is some there there, that the

Russia election tampering he firmly believes took place may be much broader than

previously thought. Cato's Patrick Edington and Julian Sanchez offered their thoughts on yesterday's testimony.

We spoke just after its conclusion.

If you just read the testimony that was, that James Comi provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee,

it seemed like a lot of facts that we largely already

knew from leaked accounts of memos.

But what did we learn about the various interactions that James Comi had with President

Trump while he was still FBI director?

Well, I think what was interesting for me, there are four or five different major subject areas,

I'll say, that were kind of covered today.

And you're hitting on the one, of course, that everybody, I I think was kind of on the edge of their seats about.

Now what was interesting from my perspective is that Komi admitted that he did not push back as forcefully or directly on Trump's quote hope end quote that he would let the

Flynn investigation drop because he was quote stunned essentially that Trump would even

do such a thing.

He made it very clear in his testimony and he was asked this question by multiple senators,

why did you feel the need to do these memorandums for the record?

And he said that in Trump's case, he felt compelled to do so because of, quote circumstances the subject matter and the person involved end quote

And I came away with a very clear impression that he felt that the president was an utterly untrustworthy individual and that Komi felt he really

needed to kind of modify this this phrase cover his back shall we say to make sure that if Trump or any of the people around him tried to later

...