Former FBI chief didn’t trust Trump, worried about Russia investigation
WASHINGTON — Former FBI Director James Comey said in dramatic testimony Thursday he could not trust President Donald Trump to tell the truth, leading him to take extraordinary steps to document their private conversations and to make the details public to spur the appointment of a special counsel to probe 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. “The endeavor to change the way the Russia investigation was conducted, that is a big deal.”
He also revealed he was so skeptical about whether Justice Department leadership could handle the politically explosive probe 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.
Over nearly three hours of testimony, Comey grimly recounted the events that he said showed the president sought to redirect the Russia probe away from his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and get the FBI to publicly distance the president himself from the probe.
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 some legal analysts said Comey’s testimony clarified and bolstered the case that the president did just that.
Trump sought relief
Comey’s 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 probe into 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.
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, 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 may have 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.”
The hearing, broadcast nationally by at least 12 television networks, was held in a cavernous space with hundreds of seats to accommodate the intense interest. Some lawmakers not on the committee decided to sit in the audience.
Inside the hearing room, people audibly groaned or gasped when Comey said he had “no doubt” that Russian government officials were behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee last year.
Firing rationale rejected
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 told NBC’s Lester Holt that he was thinking about the Russia investigation when he decided to fire him.
He wasted little time repudiating White House statements that he was fired in part because of low morale among FBI employees who supposedly had soured on his leadership.
“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 prior 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.
Awkward meetings
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 made clear he felt the discussions were problematic and improper, in that Trump repeatedly pressed him about specific investigations that involved people close to the president.
On Feb. 14, 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 the FBI director could let go of the investigation into Flynn.
“When it comes from the president, I took it as a direction,” Comey said. 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 probe, 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 (Sessions’) body language gave me the sense of, ‘What am I going to do?’” Comey said.
Trump wasn’t target
Comey acknowledged, as the president has said, that he repeatedly told Trump that he was not personally under investigation. But he also said that in private meetings and one-on-one phone calls, the president repeatedly asked him to say publicly that he was not personally under investigation — something Comey did not want to do.
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.
A special counsel was appointed — Mueller, who is a former colleague of Comey’s — and Comey has provided him with his memos, he testified Thursday.
Comey said he still has no idea whether the president actually has tapes of their conversations, but he said: “I hope there are, and I will consent to the release of them. … The president surely knows whether he taped me, and if he did, my feelings aren’t hurt.”