James Comey speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee on 8 June 2017
“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
Donald Trump spoke these words to James Comey, former Director of the FBI, at a private meeting in the Oval Office. As Alex Ward of vox.com states, these are the most important words of Comey’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee.
Comey felt that these were a direction to him by the President of the United States.
Primary school children in England are taught that a command includes a verb in the imperative mood. In everyday social life, however, the context of an utterance helps to determine its meaning. Questioning James Comey on 8 June, Senator James Risch sought to deflect Comey’s view that Trump had given him a direction:
Sen. James Risch
He did not direct you to let it go?
James Comey
Not in his words, no.
Sen. James Risch
He did not order you to let it go?
James Comey
Again, those words are not an order.
Pressed by Risch as to whether, as the former director of the FBI, he knew of any case where a person had been charged with a criminal offence for hoping for an outcome, Comey replied:
This is a president of the United States with me alone saying I hope this. I took it as, this is what he wants me to do. I didn’t obey that, but that’s the way I took it.
Comey is drawing attention to the context of Trump’s words, and in particular to the power relationship between himself and his interlocutor. He is implicitly making a grammatical analysis of language as a social semiotic – as deriving much of its meaning from the context of use.
It remains to be seen whether the Senate Intelligence Committee will accept this more adequate socio-linguistic analysis of the President’s words.
Living in the future present 
If there’s wriggle room, the powerful will exploit it. It’s perhaps less a matter of Trumps intention and more a matter of how lawyers will use any means to argue against what is plain to most ordinary people…that Trump was trying to use his position to make nfluence an investigation that casts him in a bad light
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