Comey casts Trump as shifty
Fired, defamed to sway Russia probe’s course, he testifies
WASHINGTON — Former FBI Director James Comey said in testimony Thursday that he could not trust President Donald Trump to tell the truth, leading him to document their private conversations and to make the details public as the FBI investigated the administration over possible links to Russia.
He also accused White House officials of telling “lies, plain and simple,” about him and the FBI in an effort to cover up the real reason for his dismissal last month.
“There’s no doubt that I was fired because of the Russia investigation,” Comey said in highly anticipated testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I was fired in some way to change, or the endeavor was to change, the way the Russia investigation was being conducted. That is a very big deal.”
He also revealed he was so skeptical about whether Justice Department leadership could handle the investigation after he was fired that he arranged for details of his private conversations with the president to be made public so that an outside lawyer would take over the case.
Through nearly three hours of testimony, Comey grimly recounted the events that he said showed the president sought to redirect the Russia investigation away from his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and get the FBI to publicly distance the president himself from the inquiry.
Comey declined to say whether he thought the president had obstructed justice, saying that was a determination to be made by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But his detailed account of private talks
in which Trump repeatedly brought up the Russia matter, and asked him to issue public statements about it or drop the investigation of Flynn, left no doubt in Comey’s mind why he was canned.
“I know I was fired because something about the way I was conducting the Russia investigation was putting pressure on [Trump],” Comey said.
In response to Comey’s testimony, Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, released a statement saying the president “never, in form or substance, directed or suggested that Mr. Comey stop investigating anyone.”
Kasowitz also accused Comey of trying to “undermine this administration with selective and illegal leaks of classified information and privileged communications.”
White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said after the hearing: “I can definitely say the president is not a liar. I think it’s frankly insulting that that question would be asked.”
The president remained silent on his Twitter account before, during and after the hearing. Trump made no mention of Comey’s testimony during an appearance at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual gathering in Washington.
A former federal prosecutor, Comey testified that he took detailed notes of his private talks with the president — a departure from his practice with Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama. Comey said he did so because he was “honestly concerned” that the president might lie about what was said in their meetings. He said the two spoke in private a total of nine times before Comey was fired.
Comey’s written account of those discussions, made public Wednesday, has fueled the debate over whether the president attempted to obstruct justice by pressuring the FBI director about a sensitive investigation.
“This is not a witch hunt. This is not fake news,” said the senior Democrat on the panel, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. “This is an effort to protect our country from a new threat that quite frankly will not go away anytime soon.”
ALARMING EXPLANATIONS
Comey began his testimony by saying he became “confused and increasingly concerned” about the public explanations by White House officials for his firing on May 9, particularly after the president said he was thinking about the Russia investigation when he decided to fire him.
Trump’s original justification was Comey’s controversial handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. The White House said that Comey had lost the support of his agents and that the FBI was in disarray.
“The administration then chose to defame me and more importantly the FBI by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led,” Comey said. “Those were lies, plain and simple. And I’m so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them, and I’m so sorry the American people were told them.”
His most damning remarks were directed at the president, but in the course of his testimony Comey also raised doubts about the judgment of a host of other people, notably Justice Department officials like former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, current Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
In his written testimony released Wednesday, Comey described being summoned to a private dinner at the White House in January with the president, who told him: “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”
Comey said he “didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner.”
Comey said the conversation, in which Trump asked whether Comey intended to stay on as FBI director, despite three previous discussions in which Comey had said he would, raised concerns in his mind.
“My common sense told me what’s going on here is he’s looking to get something in exchange for granting my request to stay in the job,” Comey testified.
Comey described his state of mind as he tried to navigate a series of tense conversations with the president about the investigation into possible coordination between Trump associates and Russian operatives.
Comey said he felt the discussions were troubling and improper in that Trump repeatedly pressed him about specific investigations that involved people close to the president.
On Feb. 13, Flynn was forced to resign as national security adviser for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. At the end of 2016, the FBI investigation into Flynn wasn’t going anywhere, but then on Dec. 29, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia, and Flynn had a phone conversation with Kislyak about those sanctions, according to U.S. officials briefed on the investigation.
At the time Flynn was fired, he was being investigated for possibly lying about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, Comey said.
The day after Flynn’s ouster, a number of senior officials met the president in the Oval Office to discuss terrorism. At the end of the meeting, according to Comey, Trump asked everyone to leave but Comey.
Sessions, the attorney general, lingered until the president told him to leave, too, Comey said.
“My sense was the attorney general knew he shouldn’t be leaving, which is why he was lingering,” Comey said. “I knew something was about to happen which I should pay very close attention to.”
Once they were alone, the president told Comey he hoped he could let go of the investigation into Flynn.
“When it comes from the president, I took it as a direction,” Comey said. “This is the president of the United States, with me alone, saying, ‘I hope’ this. I took it as, this is what he wants me to do.”
He said he was shocked and concerned about the president’s request but decided not to tell Sessions about it because he expected the attorney general would soon recuse himself from the Russia case, which he eventually did.
After the meeting with Trump, Comey said he asked Sessions to prevent him from being left alone again in a room with the president. “His body language gave me the sense of, ‘What am I going to do?’” Comey said.
Asked whether that February Oval Office discussion amounted to obstruction of justice, Comey said he expected that to be a matter for Mueller, the former FBI director who has taken over the Justice Department’s investigation.
“I’m sure the special counsel will work towards, to try and understand what the intention was there, and whether that’s an offense,” he said.
His account made clear that his relationship with Trump was fraught from their very first meeting, which occurred before the inauguration, when he told the president-elect that a dossier of unsubstantiated allegations against him had been circulating around Washington.
“I didn’t want him thinking that I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over him in some way,” Comey said. “He needed to know this was being said, but I was very keen to not leave him with the impression that the bureau was trying to do something to him.”
Comey acknowledged, as the president has claimed, that he repeatedly told Trump that he was not personally under investigation. But he also said that in private meetings and one-onone phone calls, the president repeatedly asked him to say publicly that he was not personally under investiga tion — something Comey did not want to do.
‘I HOPE THERE ARE TAPES’
After firing Comey, the president tweeted a suggestion that there could be tapes of their private talks.
“The president tweeted on Friday after I got fired that I’d better hope there are not tapes,” Comey said. That made the ex-FBI director think any such tapes would back up his account of Trump’s improper statements, so he said he asked a friend of his to share with a reporter a memo he had written about the February conversation.
“I thought it might prompt the appointment of a special counsel,” Comey said.
Asked by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., why he felt he had the authority to do that, Comey replied: “As a private citizen, I felt free to share that. I thought it was very important to get it out.”
The friend is Daniel Richman, a law professor and a former federal prosecutor who confirmed his role but declined to comment further. The reporter is Michael Schmidt of The New York Times, who declined to comment.
A special counsel — Mueller, who is a former colleague of Comey’s — was appointed a day after the memos were reported, and Comey has provided him with his memos, Comey testified Thursday.
Comey said he still has no idea whether the president actually has tapes of their conversations.
“Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” he said at the hearing. He added: “The president
surely knows if there are tapes. If there are, my feelings aren’t hurt. Release the tapes.”
The White House has not commented on whether recordings exist.