In the normal course of events, one could understand the hundreds of “I don’t knows” and “I don’t recalls” former FBI Director James Comey during Friday’s testimony. Most FBI investigations are handled out of the field office in which the illegality allegedly occurred with the FBI Director not privy to all the details. But it was Comey who decided to run the whole Trump collusion and obstruction investigation out of FBI headquarters. He should have known and remembered every detail of his actions and those under him. He did.

Don’t count the “I can’t recalls” Just counting the contradictions and the lies would make quite a drinking game, starting the case which started it all -- Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s “process lie” about his legitimate contacts with his Russian counterparts as a national security adviser designate:

On Friday May 11, 2018, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein stating Comey testified the FBI didn’t think General Flynn lied.

In a March 2017 briefing then-FBI Director James Comey had with the House Intel Committee, he told members that the FBI agents who interviewed General Flynn “saw nothing that indicated to them that [General Flynn] knew he was lying to them.” …

The unredacted portion of the House Intel report revealed Comey testified to House Intel members the FBI agents who ambushed Flynn did not detect any deception. The report also revealed the illegal leak of Flynn’s phone call with Kislyak is what allowed the FBI/DOJ to keep a counterintel operation open on General Flynn.

The Obama-Comey deep state opened an investigation on Flynn and leaked information on his discussion with his Russian counterpart. This was during the Trump transition period. This was Flynn’s job. The FBI under Comey opened an investigation on Flynn for DOING HIS JOB! On Friday James Comey testified behind closed doors with Congressional investigators. Comey told Congress on Friday that Flynn did lie.

So which is it, Mr. Comey? Was Flynn lying or not and if you were so far above the fray, how could you know? Or are you the only liar in this scenario? Why was Gen. Flynn punished for making false statements while you are not in the dock for doing so repeatedly? Why is Flynn’s leaker and those responsible for his politically motivated unmasking not under indictment? Why are you, whose leak of a private conversation in the Oval Office with the President sparked the fraudulent appointment of a special counsel in the absence of a crime, not under indictment?

Comey on Friday asked us all to believe that the man who remembered enough to write a book suddenly had total memory loss, saying “I don’t know” or the equivalent some 245 times. Comey claimed little knowledge of the Steele dossier yet he signed a FISA warrant based on it to spy on candidate and then President Trump all while he knew it was a fraud. His defense in front of Congress on Friday was that he didn’t know it was a fraud or he forgot.

Unfortunately, Comey can’t hide behind his lies because there is evidence he did know the FISA warrant was a fraud:

Comey told investigators that the anti-Trump dossier authored by longtime British intelligence agent Christopher Steele was largely unverified before and after a FISA warrant was obtained to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, according to a report.  

The Hill’s John Solomon reports:

The towering ex-FBI boss confessed that the FBI had not corroborated much of the Steele dossier before it was submitted as evidence to a secret court to support a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the final weeks of the election.And Comey admitted much of the dossier remained uncorroborated more than six months later when he was fired by President Trump.              

The original FISA warrant application submitted in October 2016, along with the three 90-day renewal, were labeled “Verified application. “The FBI has reviewed this verified application for accuracy in accordance with its April 5, 2001 procedures, which include sending a copy of the draft to the appropriate field office(s),” the applications read. Along with being unaware of the dossier’s veracity, Comey did not know that Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department’s fourth-highest ranking official before his demotion last year, was a go-between for collecting so-called intelligence from Steele after the FBI terminated its relationship with the agent for alleging leaking information to the media. Further, Solomon reports that Comey could not recall that Steele’s relationship with the bureau had even been terminated.  "His memory was so bad I feared he might not remember how to get out of the room after the interview,” an unnamed congressman told Solomon. “It was like he suddenly developed dementia or Alzheimer’s, after conveniently remembering enough facts to sell his book,” said another.                                

Indeed, if the Steele dossier was “salacious and unverified” when he briefed the new President, it was also salacious and unverified when the FISA warrants he signed off on incorporating it were issued, with Comey an active participant on committing a fraud upon the court.

Perhaps the most interesting dip into disingenuousness was Comey’s insistence that the man who made him a multi-millionaire, Robert Mueller, was merely a passing acquaintance:

“Are you best friends with Robert Mueller?” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked Comey, according to a transcript of the hearing released Saturday by Goodlatte and Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).

“I am not,” Comey said. “I admire the heck out of the man, but I don't know his phone number, I've never been to his house, I don't know his children's names.”

Comey added: “I think I had a meal once alone with him in a restaurant. I like him. I am not a -- I'm an associate of his who admires him greatly. We're not friends in any social sense.”

Again Comey is lying. Their “long-standing relationship” was confirmed by that Trump-loving vast right-conspiracy rag called the Washington Post:

They’ve been described as law enforcement twins and “brothers in arms.”

#COMEY & #Mueller were brothers in arms in famous 2004 standoff over domestic surveillance. Cagey choice by DAG Rosenstein.

-- Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) May 17, 2017

Once again, James Comey and Robert Mueller -- two respected FBI veterans -- have found themselves sharing the same high-profile headlines.

The two men’s working relationship can be traced back to at least December of 2003, when Comey joined Mueller in Washington after he became John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, according to a 2013 Washingtonian article about the two men’s long-standing relationship.

“He and Mueller spent many hours together, developing a close partnership -- and watching together the disarray in the government over how to respond to the unfolding war on terror,” Washingtonian notes…

Perhaps the most interesting -- and lucrative -- aspect of this long-standing relationship between these “brothers in arms” that Comey now denies, is how then-FBI director Mueller used his position to enrich casual acquaintance Comey. It is worth noting the cozy financial relationship between two former FBI directors, James Comey and Robert Mueller, which goes a long way towards explaining their joint animus to President Trump and their passionate desire to bring down his presidency.

Robert Mueller owes his job as special counsel to long-time friend Comey, who famously leaked government documents written on government computers on government time to the New York Times via a professor friend regarding conversations with President Trump. Comey owes a great deal of his financial wealth to Robert Mueller.

Seamus Bruner, Government Accountability Institute Researcher and author of  Compromised: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption, recently explained how former FBI Directors James Comey and Robert Mueller leveraged their government contacts to enrich themselves when Comey briefly left government service to work for major government contractor Lockheed Martin:

Bruner noted the growth of Comey’s net worth between 2003 and 2009, after Comey left the Department of Justice to join Lockheed Martin as senior vice president and lead counsel.

“It doesn’t really make much sense why [Lockheed Martin] would pay [James Comey] upwards of six million dollars in a single year,” assessed Bruner. “But one reason -- aside from his security clearance -- is that his buddy Robert Mueller is running the FBI. They begin passing 100-million-dollar-plus contracts to Lockheed Martin.”

Bruner continued, “One of these contracts was actually worth a billion dollars, and it was protested formally by the other bidder: IBM… The contracts flowed from Robert Mueller’s FBI to James Comey’s private sector employer, Lockheed Martin, and James Comey made many millions over a short period of time.”

Bruner described Comey as “one of the prime examples of this kind of cashing in on government contacts.”

 “We followed the money and realized that James Comey made well over ten million dollars from when he left the public sector in 2005 and by the time he returned to serve as FBI director [in 2009],” said Bruner. “He even made over six million dollars in a single year at the top government contracting corporation, Lockheed Martin; they get over $50 billion a year in government contracts.”

James Comey is a serial liar and arguably a serial felon who supervised and directed Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page in an organized deep state coup to keep Hillary Clinton out of prison and Donald Trump out of the White House. And along the way he picked up a few million bucks thanks to a long-standing friend, colleague and benefactor, Robert Mueller, whom he then rewarded a license to overthrow a sitting President of the United States.

Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.