Sacked FBI director unleashes on Trump
SACKED Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey has launched a scathing attack on Donald Trump, accusing him of telling “lies, plain and simple”.
Mr Comey has appeared before a US Senate hearing investigating whether Russia interfered with the 2016 election and whether anyone in the President’s camp helped.
Mr Comey told Congress he was “confused” and increasingly concerned over the “shifting explanations” for why Mr Trump abruptly fired him on May 9.
The White House initially said he was sacked because of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email scandal, but Mr Trump offered a different explanation in a subsequent interview, saying he had long planned to fire Mr Comey because he was a “showboat” and a “grandstander” who had put the FBI into “turmoil”.
Mr Comey said the Trump administration “chose to defame me and, more importantly, the FBI by saying the organisation was in disarray”.
“Those were lies, plain and simple, and I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them,” he said.
Mr Comey told the hearing he believed he was fired over how he was conducting the Russia investigation.
He said he was so concerned about his encounters with the President that he took notes straight after each meeting.
“I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting and so I thought it really important to document it,” Mr Comey said.
“I knew there might come a FIRED: Ex-FBI director James Comey.
day when I might need a record of what had happened not just to defend myself but to defend the FBI and our integrity.”
In a statement released before his testimony, Mr Comey described a “very awkward” one-on-one dinner at the White House where Mr Trump said “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty”.
Mr Comey said the dinner was designed to “create some sort of patronage relationship”.
“My common sense told me that what’s going on here is he’s looking to get something in exchange for granting my request to stay in the job,” he said.
“The reason that Congress created a 10-year term (for the FBI director) is so ... the director is not feeling as if they’re serving with political loyalty owed to any particular person.”
Mr Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz later denied to reporters the President ever asked for Mr Comey’s loyalty.
Mr Comey revealed he had leaked his own memos of his meetings with Mr Trump in the hope it would lead to a special prosecutor being appointed to investigate the President’s request to drop the probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had resigned over his ties to Russians.