No Trump veto for Comey’s testimony
DONALD Trump will not use presidential powers to prevent the ex-FBI director James Comey from testifying to Congress tomorrow, the White House said, setting the stage for potentially explosive testimony later this week.
The ousted FBI director will appear before the Senate intelligence committee for a hearing sure to be replete with political drama and intrigue.
Most major US television networks plan to carry the event live.
Comey’s testimony will be the first public remarks since he was summarily fired by Trump early last month, and represent a moment of great peril for this already embattled president.
Comey’s sacking came as the Federal Bureau of Investigation probes possible collusion between the president’s election campaign team and Russia – which US intelligence believes hoped to tilt the election in the Republican’s favour.
He will face a barrage of questions from Republican and Democratic politicians about the circumstances of his firing, as well as allegations that Trump tried to get Comey to shelve the investigation of his aides.
Comey is said to have written detailed notes about three conversations he had with Trump while still FBI director.
The memorandums reportedly document the president’s efforts to get the FBI to ease the investigation’s focus on former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Any confirmation that Trump tried to press Comey would open the president to damaging allegations that he attempted to obstruct an ongoing FBI investigation.
Comey’s hotly awaited appearance on Capitol Hill comes as probes by the Department of Justice and several congressional committees heat up.
Trump’s decision to fire Comey led the Department of Justice to appoint special counsel -- former FBI director Robert Mueller -- to look into allegations of collusion.
A top secret National Security Agency document, meanwhile, shows that hackers from Russian military intelligence repeatedly tried to break into US voting systems before last year’s presidential election, The Intercept reported on Monday.
The online news outlet said the NSA report depicted a hacking operation tied closely to Moscow’s GRU intelligence directorate that targeted private US companies providing voter registration services and equipment to local governments around the country.
The alleged leak of the National Security Agency document by one of the tens of thousands of private contractors to US spy agencies, barely one month after the report was written, became the newest embarrassment for the US intelligence community.