President contradicts White House version of Comey firing
Trump says he was prepared to fire FBI head before Justice recommendation
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump offered a new version of his decision to fire James Comey, saying Thursday that he would have dismissed the FBI director regardless of whether the attorney general and his deputy recommended it.
It was just the latest in a series of statements, some of them contradictory, to whiplash Washington over 48 hours that began with Comey’s firing on Tuesday evening. And it was unusually harsh: Trump castigated Comey as “a showboat” and “a grandstander,” suggesting that his issues with the FBI director went beyond any previously stated concerns.
Trump said Thursday that he had not relied solely on the advice from the Justice Department’s top two leaders in making his decision. And, for the first time, he explicitly referenced the FBI’s investigation into his administration’s ties to Russia in defending Comey’s firing.
“And in fact, when I decided to just
do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,’ ” Trump told Lester Holt of NBC News. “It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”
Earlier, the White House had said that Trump acted only after Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, came to him and recommended that Comey be dismissed because of his handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email. In his Tuesday letter terminating Comey, Trump said he had “accepted their recommendation.” And Vice President Mike Pence, talking to reporters, echoed his boss.
But by the next day, that story had begun to unravel.
Rosenstein and Donald McGahn II, the White House counsel, spoke by telephone on Wednesday to review details that precipitated the firing, seeking to agree on a version of events that could be released to the public.
That conversation led to a new timeline that the White House shared with reporters hours later. It said that Trump had in recent weeks been “strongly inclined to remove” Comey, but that he had made his final decision only after receiving written recommendations on Tuesday from Rosenstein and Sessions.
And then on Thursday, the president himself brushed away that narrative, reversing his own aides’ version of events.
In fact, the president asserted, he had decided to fire Comey well before he received the advice from the Justice Department officials. He said he was frustrated by Comey’s public testimony regarding the FBI investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 campaign and its possible contacts with Trump’s advisers.
“I was going to fire Comey — my decision,” Trump told NBC. “I was going to fire regardless of recommendation.”
The president’s comments appeared aimed at reassuring Rosenstein, who was reportedly upset at the White House’s original narrative that seemed to suggest he had instigated Comey’s firing. The White House has cited Rosenstein’s reputation as a straight-shooter in justifying Trump’s move.
But the president’s storyline left the White House struggling to explain his motivation for firing his FBI director a day after calling the Russia investigation nothing more than a “taxpayerfunded charade” that should end.
Critics said the credibility of the White House had been badly damaged and renewed calls for a special prosecutor to take over the Russia investigation, independent of the administration.
The White House’s explanation was challenged on Thursday in other ways as well. The president’s spokeswoman said Wednesday that Comey was fired in part because he had lost the support of rank-and-file FBI employees. But on Thursday, Andrew McCabe, the new acting director of the agency, told the Senate that Comey enjoyed “broad support within the FBI and still does to this day.”
And while the White House said Wednesday that the Russia inquiry was only a small part of the bureau’s activities, McCabe called it “a highly significant investigation.”
Throughout the rapidly shifting 48 hours, Rosenstein appeared to be caught in the middle.
Confirmed just last month, he made a trip to Capitol Hill on Thursday for a previously unannounced meeting with the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In a brief hallway conversation with a reporter, Rosenstein denied reports that he had threatened to quit.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has agreed to invite Rosenstein to brief the entire Senate next week, said the minority leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York.
In his Wednesday deliberations with McGahn, Rosenstein made clear that the timeline needed to be accurate, and that he did not want to “massage” the version of events. That meeting included Sessions and senior White House staff members, according to a person familiar with the conversation who was not authorized to discuss it. It concluded with a foursentence statement that was released by the White House on Wednesday evening.
That statement noted that Trump had met with both Rosenstein and Sessions on Monday to discuss reasons to remove Comey. It said that Rosenstein had submitted his written recommendation to Sessions on Tuesday, who sent his own recommendation to Trump soon afterward.
Rosenstein’s memo, while highly critical of Comey’s actions over the past year, stopped short of explicitly recommending his ouster. “Although the president has the power to remove an FBI director,” he wrote, “the decision should not be taken lightly.”
In the NBC interview, Trump elaborated on his claim that Comey had told him on three occasions that the president himself was not under investigation. The FBI has been looking into whether associates of Trump and his campaign coordinated with Russia as Moscow orchestrated an effort to intervene in the American election and tilt the election to Trump.
Trump said Comey had reassured him first at a private dinner, and then during two phone conversations. He acknowledged that he had directly asked if he was being investigated.
“I said, ‘If it’s possible, would you let me know if I’m under investigation?’ ” Trump said. “He said, ‘You are not under investigation.’ ”
The admission raised questions Thursday among reporters, who asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders, deputy White House press secretary, whether it was inappropriate for the president to ask the FBI director whether he was under investigation. “No, I don’t believe it is,” Sanders said.
The president said Comey requested the dinner early in his administration to ask to keep his job. That would be an unusual — and perhaps unnecessary — step for an FBI director, who by law is appointed for a 10-year term. Comey was four years into his term when Trump was inaugurated.
“He wanted to stay on as the FBI head,” Trump said. “I said: ‘I’ll consider. We’ll see what happens.’ But we had a very nice dinner and at that time, he told me I wasn’t under investigation, which I knew anyway.”
In explaining his decision to fire Comey, Trump said that “the FBI has been in turmoil” since last year, an apparent reference to the controversy over how the Clinton investigation was managed, and “it hasn’t recovered from that.”
Trump also insisted, as he has before, that there was “no collusion between my campaign and Russia.”
The interview underscored what has been a continuing challenge for the Trump administration to provide the public with accurate information about the president’s actions and motivations.
On Tuesday evening, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said in an interview on Fox Business Network that it was Rosenstein who had “made a determination” about Comey and the president had followed it. At the time, Spicer was merely dutifully relaying the White House’s position.
Pence did the same in his comments to reporters the next day. And at the daily White House briefing on Wednesday, Sanders was asked whether the advice from Rosenstein and Sessions was only a pretext for a decision the president had already made. “No,” Sanders said.
On Thursday, after the president’s NBC interview, she changed gears.
“I hadn’t had a chance to have the conversation directly with the president,” she said. “I’d had several conversations with him, but I didn’t ask that question directly — ‘had you already made that decision.’ I went off of the information that I had when I answered your question.”
But she stuck by her contention that Comey had lost the faith of his employees — even though the agency’s acting director had contradicted it. “I’ve certainly heard from a large number of individuals, and that’s just myself,” Sanders said, “and I don’t even know that many people in the FBI.”