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White House disputes Comey memo
He’s said to have asked ex-FBI head to drop aide probe
The White House is disputing a report that President Donald Trump asked former FBI Director James Comey to shut down an investigation into ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The New York Times says Trump made the request to Comey during a February meeting. The newspaper cites a memo Comey wrote after the meeting. Trump fired Comey last week. The White House says the report is “not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the president and Mr. Comey.”
WASHINGTON — The White House on Tuesday confronted what could be the most serious allegation to date against President Donald Trump — reports that in February he asked the FBI director, James Comey, to drop an investigation of the president’s ex-national security adviser.
Comey, whom Trump fired last week, wrote a memo shortly after the Oval Office encounter on Feb. 14, memorializing Trump’s words, according to a close associate of his who had read the document and described it in an interview. Comey wrote several other memos describing encounters with Trump that he found troubling, the associate said.
The existence of the memos was first reported by The New York Times.
The White House denied that Trump asked Comey to close the investigation of Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia. The meeting between Trump and Comey came one day after Flynn was fired by Trump.
The report on the Trump-Comey meeting raised serious questions about potential presidential interference in a criminal investigation. It broke just hours after Trump responded to another Russia-related controversy that erupted on Monday.
In tweets Tuesday morning, Trump said that he had shared information with two Russian officials about an Islamic State plot against civilian aircraft. His tweets partially confirmed stories by The Washington Post and New York Times that said that the information Trump shared was highly classified and came from a U.S. ally that provided it on condition it not be passed to others.
Trump wrote that he had an “absolute right” as president to share the information. In making his case, he undermined carefully crafted denials of the stories that his aides had offered a day earlier.
The back-to-back controversies hit the White House even as it sought to control the damage from last week’s unexpected firing of Comey. They also came just days before Trump is scheduled to leave the U.S. for his first overseas trip as president, an eightday journey through the Mideast and Europe that already posed numerous potential problems for the administration.
The new report on Trump’s February meeting with Comey about the related Flynn probe added to the already intense scrutiny over the president’s recent decision to fire Comey, raising the legal and political risk for the administration.
Trump’s aides initially said that he fired Comey because of the former FBI director’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices as secretary of state. Trump contradicted that account last week in an interview with NBC News, saying that when he sacked the FBI director he was thinking about “the Russia thing.” The bureau since last summer has been investigating Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and potential collusion by the Trump campaign — an investigation that Trump days ago decried as a waste of taxpayers’ money.
Throughout the day, Democrats stepped up calls for congressional investigations as well as for a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of the assorted matters involving possible ties between Trump associates and Russia. Some Republicans demanded to see the Comey memo and continued to criticize the president’s actions.
Trump aides began Tuesday by struggling to reconcile their earlier denials that Trump had disclosed classified information to the Russian officials, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, with the president’s own acknowledgment that he’d done so.
“It is wholly appropriate for the president to share whatever information he thinks is to the advancement of the security of the American people,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster told reporters.
Trump himself, in brief public comments during an appearance with visiting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suggested that his “very, very successful meeting” with the Russians had been intended to enlist their help in battling Islamic State in Syria.
Members of Congress in both parties, meanwhile, grew increasingly impatient with the White House responses to the controversies piling up. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a television interview, “We could do with a little less drama from the White House.”
McMaster said Trump’s disclosure to the Russians was impromptu. He said the president was unaware of the source of the intelligence he shared, which, as McMaster confirmed, involved an Islamic State plot to use laptop computers as explosive devices aboard commercial aircraft.
On Tuesday, The New York Times and other news organizations reported that Israel was the source of the intelligence of the laptop plot. The information was not to be widely shared even with the U.S. government, according to reports, and its disclosure threatened to complicate the United States’ intelligencesharing with foreign allies.
Trump’s actions could jeopardize current discussions between the United States and foreign allies about a U.S. proposal to ban laptop computers on civilian airliners bound from certain countries for the United States. American national security officials plan to brief close allies in Brussels about the threat Wednesday.