The former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), James Comey, told a U.S. Senate panel on Thursday that he took President Donald Trump’s remarks about letting former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn off the hook in an investigation as an inappropriate direction and decided to keep a record of it. The President’s remarks, though not framed as such, amounted to an order which he could not follow, Mr. Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a much-awaited public testimony after Mr. Trump fired him as Director.
Mr. Comey said he believed that he was fired in an “attempt to change the course of the Russian investigation”, but refused to go into details of this assessment.
“I took it as a direction,” Mr. Comey said. “It’s the president of the United States, with me alone,” he said of Mr. Trump’s remarks to him during a meeting in which only the two were present. In a written testimony submitted to the panel, Mr. Comey has quoted the President as saying: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”
Former FBI chief James Comey (left) and U.S. President Donald Trump. File photo
Conversation recordings
Mr. Comey said he recorded his recollection of this and other conversations with the President given the unusual combination of factors surrounding them and thinking that a “day might come when I will be requiring those records.”
Mr. Comey said he would be happy if there is a recording of the conversations available, as Mr. Trump had indicated in a tweet after firing Mr. Comey. “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” the former FBI Director told the Senate Committee. He said in his interactions with two former Presidents, he did not feel the need to record it. The former FBI chief also told the panel that he shared with a friend the content of the memos that he prepared on conversations with the President.
Mr. Comey said a lot of leaked reports regarding the ongoing investigation into Russia’s alleged role in the U.S. election did not reflect an accurate picture of it as the agency cannot join issue with the news outlets on individual reports and correct them.
The Senate Committee has been trying to maintain bipartisan cohesion in their oversight role in the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s alleged involvement in American presidential election in 2016, but Republican and Democratic members appeared to be taking divergent lines of questioning during Mr. Comey’s testimony.
The Republican line of questioning led Mr. Comey to admit that there is no investigation as of now against Mr. Trump for Russian collusion.
