Just-resigned Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne appears to believe he has the goods on disgraced former FBI Director James Comey and disgraced former FBI special agent Peter Strzok.
“Go stick a television camera on Peter Strzok or James Comey, and just say the name Patrick Bryne. You will see a former director of the FBI crap his pants,” he said unabashedly during an appearance Thursday evening on Fox News’ “The Story with Martha MacCallum.”
The stunning remark was made at the end of a nearly 25-minute-long discussion about his resignation earlier that day from Overstock, as well as his allegations that he was recruited during the 2016 presidential election to help the Obama Department of Justice carry out acts of “political espionage” against various politics figures, including then-candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Watch the whole discussion below:
He claims that at the time that he had been recruited, he was unaware that what he’d be helping the DOJ with was “political espionage.” Given as he’d previously helped the DOJ with other legitimate cases, he’d assumed everything was on the up and up.
“They got back in touch with me a third time, and I was given some fishy orders,” he said. “I carried them out in 2015-2016 thinking I was conducting law enforcement. … The men in black as I called them showed up and asked for this third favor. A guy named Peter Strzok, and well, three staff — Carlin, McCabe, Comey, that was who sent the orders.”
He referenced then-Assistant Attorney General John Carlin, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and then-FBI Director Comey.
When asked what he was asked by them to do, he replied, “Political espionage.”
“This was all political espionage conducted against Hillary Clinton, [Marco] Rubio, [Ted] Cruz, and Trump,” he said. “This is not a theory of mine — some political theory. I was in the room when it happened in a way. I mean, not in a way. I was part of it.”
While the details of this alleged “espionage” remain unclear, Byrne has previously claimed that it involved a relationship he purposefully had as per FBI orders with a Russian spy by the name of Maria Butina. Last year she pleaded guilty to felony charges of acting as a foreign agent of Russia within the U.S. without approval and was sentenced to 18 months behind bars.
Moreover, this aspect of the story has been confirmed to some degree by Butina’s own lawyers, who wrote a letter to the Trump Justice Department earlier this summer revealing certain details about the relationship and their contact with Byrne:
??Today isn’t the first time Patrick Byrne has told his story, he reached out to Butina’s lawyers last month and it paints a more complete picture. This letter to @TheJusticeDept @JusticeOIG and OPR was sent July 25th and it’s alarming if true. https://t.co/76jy7EZRQl pic.twitter.com/GvnOrdtj3w
— Rosie memos (@almostjingo) August 23, 2019
What Byrne has been unwilling to do thus far, however, is name any names besides Strzok. This changed Thursday on Fox News, when he brought up a whole host of additional names. However, he resisted calls for further information on their involvement in the alleged “political espionage.”
“Guys like Strzok and stuff are the errand boys. They are the clerks who sent the messages for some,” he said during one point in the discussion.
“Is it John Brennan? Is it James Clapper? Is it Comey?” MacCallum then asked, referencing disgraced former CIA Director John Brennan, disgraced former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Comey again. All three have been implicated in the Obama administration’s allegedly illegitimate “spying” of Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“[Attorney] General Barr has that information …,” Byrne replied.
What’s also notable about the discussion Thursday is that the former Overstock CEO repeatedly tried to deflect blame from the FBI. Despite allegedly performing most, if not all, of the alleged “political espionage,” Byrne argued that the bureau had simply been following orders from “the top.”
“It’s horrible to even say the initials FBI involved in this,” he said. “It wasn’t the FBI. The FBI got hijacked from the top. It’s the top. It’s … there’s three officials whose names were used with me. X, Y, and Z, I’m not going to say on your show, the feds all have this. I’m sorry, the legitimate feds all have this as of April. There were three names used at the — three senior officials.”
Did he mean Brennan, Clapper and Comey? He wouldn’t say, though it seems telling how he eventually concluded the interview.
Speaking later Thursday evening on CNN, the former Overstock CEO brought Comey back up again, telling host Chris Cuomo that the former FBI director had been aware of the orders he’d received.
“So you believe that Jim Comey knew that you were being asked to do these things in the name of the United States government?” Cuomo asked him.
“Not only knew. I was specifically told, this request is coming from Jim Comey at the request of somebody, who I’m not going to name. Do not assume it is the president. Do not assume it was President Obama. Do not assume that,” he replied.
Listen:
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne says:
-He liked Obama, did not vote for Trump
-More whistleblowers are coming forward
-National security state was weaponized
-James Comey knew “100%”
-Republicans wrong, Democrats did not dream up the investigation, it was the FBI and was politicized pic.twitter.com/KK4HNedsSU— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) August 23, 2019
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Vivek@bizpacreview.com
V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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