‘Defamed’: Remarks about him, agency false, ex-FBI chief says
WASHINGTON — The first words out of fired FBI Director James Comey’s mouth Thursday were an accusation aimed directly at President Trump: The White House had “defamed” him and had lied, “plain and simple,” when it said he had left his agency in disarray.
By the time he concluded his public testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in November’s election, Comey had said he compiled memos of his dealings with Trump because he feared that the
president “would lie”; that he had leaked those memos after his firing last month to hasten the appointment of a special counsel in the Russia investigation; and that he hoped Trump had indeed taped their conversations.
Comey’s testimony lived up to its billing as a historic moment in American politics — never before has a former director of the FBI publicly portrayed a president as someone who couldn’t be relied upon to tell the truth.
Trump remained silent on Comey during and after the testimony. But his personal attorney struck back, issuing a statement saying Comey had admitted he was among “those in government who are actively attempting to undermine this administration with selective and illegal leaks of classified information and privileged communications.”
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked afterward to defend Trump’s honesty, responded, “I can definitively say the president is not a liar.”
Comey stopped short — but only barely — of accusing Trump of committing a crime by what he described as a lobbying effort to go light on former national security adviser Michael Flynn in the FBI’s Russia investigation. Flynn was forced out of his job in February for lying to Vice President Mike Pence and others about his contacts with Russian officials during the presidential transition.
“I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the president was an effort to obstruct,” Comey said of one exchange. “I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning.”
It’s up to special counsel Robert Mueller, his former close colleague who is leading a parallel Justice Department investigation into Russia, to decide whether Trump or others in the administration obstructed the probe, Comey said. He said he believed Trump had fired him as a way to close down the Russia investigation, and called that “a very big deal.”
Under questioning by California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a former chair of the Intelligence Committee, Comey said the FBI’s senior leadership team was as “shocked and troubled by it as I was” after Trump asked him to back off the Flynn investigation. Despite that, Comey admitted, he didn’t take his concerns to the Justice Department — Attorney General Jeff Sessions was on the verge of recusing himself from the probe for his own contacts with Russian officials, and no other senior officials had won Senate confirmation, Comey said.
Feinstein asked why Comey, a “big” and “strong” man, would be so intimidated by Trump that he would not stop the president and tell him, “This is wrong.”
Comey replied, “It‘s a great question. Maybe if I were stronger, I would have. I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took (it) in.”
Referring to a May 12 tweet by Trump — “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” — Comey said, “Look, I’ve seen the tweet about tapes. Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”
Sen. Kamala Harris, DCalif., sought to poke a hole in GOP arguments that Trump only “hoped” Comey would back off the Flynn investigation, rather than ordered him to. Comey has said Trump’s exact words to him were, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”
“In my experience of prosecuting cases, when a robber held a gun to somebody’s head and said, ‘I hope you will give me your wallet,’ the word ‘hope’ was not the operative word at that moment,” said Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney.
Dealing with Trump was unlike working under two other presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Comey said. He never felt the need to document his meetings with them, he said, but reached a different conclusion with Trump after the first of their nine conversations, during the transition.
“I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting, so I thought it important to document,” Comey said. “I knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself, but to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function. That’s what made this so difficult . ... It was a combination of circumstances, subject matter and the particular person.”
Those conversations included one in which the president had asked for his “loyalty” and a meeting at the White House where Trump ordered everyone out of the room before asking Comey to go light on Flynn, the former director said.
Comey said he deliberately left the memo of that meeting unclassified, so it could be more readily accessible to government officials. After his firing, when Trump issued his “tapes” tweet, Comey said he woke up at midnight and realized there could be evidence of that talk.
He said his side of the story “had to get out,” so he asked a friend of his, a professor at Columbia Law School, to share his notes with the press, in the hope it would prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
Trump’s private attorney, Marc Kasowitz, seized on that when he issued his statement rebutting Comey’s testimony. He accused Comey of being “one of these leakers” of classified information inside the government and — while denying that Trump had demanded Comey’s loyalty — said that “the office of the president is entitled to expect loyalty from those who are serving in an administration.”
Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor and U.S. attorney now at the law firm Dorsey and Whitney, said Kasowitz’s assertion that Comey had leaked potentially privileged information was “total nonsense.”
“There was no executive privilege for these conversations,” Akerman said. “A conversation in furtherance of a criminal scheme to obstruct justice is not covered by executive privilege. End of story.”
Kasowitz also said Comey had conceded that there was “no evidence that a single vote changed (in the November election) as result of Russian interference.” Comey said there was no evidence of direct ballot tampering. But he confirmed “a massive effort to target government and nongovernmental, near-governmental agencies” to affect the election.
“There should be no fuzz on this,” Comey said. “The Russians interfered. That happened. It’s about as unfake as you can possibly get,” a reference to Trump’s repeated assertions that the Russian investigation is “fake news.”
Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which is conducting a separate Russia investigation, called Comey’s testimony “pretty breathtaking,” and said the next steps for his committee are to corroborate Comey’s testimony with other witnesses.
Schiff said getting to the bottom of what Russia did last year ultimately is the point of the investigations.
“We know the Russians are going to interfere again,” he said. “We need to be able to prepare ourselves, defend ourselves, and really inoculate ourselves against that kind of intervention.”