Comey’s most revealing moments
Ex-FBI chief James Comey told Congress that the Trump administration’s comments about him and the FBI were “lies plain and simple”.
Mr Comey told a Senate committee they were wrong to denigrate the agency and its leadership.
He was also “confused” by the “shifting explanations” for his sacking, which came as he led a probe into any links between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
President Donald Trump later said he never sought to impede the inquiry.
Mr Trump’s attorney, Marc Kasowitz, said in a statement Mr Comey’s testimony “finally confirmed publicly” that the president was not under investigation as part of any probe in Russian political meddling.
In the statement, Mr Trump also denied asking Mr Comey for his loyalty or to drop an investigation into fired national security adviser Michael Flynn during private meetings.
In his testimony, Mr Comey said Mr Trump had repeatedly told him he was doing a “great” job.
He also suggested he was fired to “change the way the Russia investigation was being conducted”.
The former FBI boss remained largely composed throughout almost three hours of testimony but became impassioned when delivering his opening remarks.
He told the panel that the White House “chose to defame me, and more importantly the FBI” by claiming the agency was “poorly led”.
“Those were lies, plain and simple. And I’m so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them,” he continued.
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“The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is and always will be independent,” he said in his opening remarks.
Mr Comey was leading one of several Russia investigations before Mr Trump fired him.
US intelligence agencies believe Russia interfered in the US election and they are investigating alleged links between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
But there is no known evidence of collusion and President Donald Trump has dismissed the story as “fake news”.
His spokeswoman Sarah Sanders on Thursday hit back at Mr Comey, saying: “I can definitively say the president is not a liar.”
‘Staggering blow’ for Trump – Anthony Zurcher, BBC News
For Donald Trump the good news from James Comey’s testimony is that the former FBI director clearly said the president was not directly under FBI investigation at the time he was fired. The bad news was, well, everything else.
On multiple occasions, Mr Comey said he was either concerned or knew that the president or his administration was lying “plain and simple” – about the circumstances of his dismissal and about the nature of his meetings with the president.
It’s clear the president woefully mishandled this, for which he has paid a high price ever since. By unceremoniously sacking him, and offering a muddle of explanations for it, he created an adversary with both the means and the motivation to respond in the most damaging way.
Mr Comey had a friend leak disturbing information about the president’s actions to the media. He was given the biggest spotlight in a generation to publicly air further details. He stood before a Senate committee not just to defend himself, but also the honour of the FBI.
The White House may claim today’s testimony is a technical exoneration. Politically, however, it’s a staggering blow. And when it comes to the presidency, politics is everything.
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During Thursday’s testimony, Mr Comey emphasised that Russia’s political meddling was “not a close call”, adding: “There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever.”
When asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee whether the president tried to stop the Russia investigation, Mr Comey said: “Not to my understanding, no.”
He said he it was not for him to say whether Mr Trump’s actions were an obstruction of justice.
Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the committee’s vice chairman, pressed Mr Comey on why he decided to keep a record of his conversations with Mr Trump.
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“I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting” he said.
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Mr Comey, who published his prepared remarks a day before the hearing, detailed one meeting with Mr Trump in which the president asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House aide Jared Kushner to leave the Oval Office.
“I knew something was about to happen that I needed to pay very close attention to,” he said. “I remember thinking that that was a very disturbing development.”
Comey on Flynn conversation: “It’s not for me to say if obstruction of justice”
During another meeting with Mr Trump, Mr Comey said the president appealed to him to “let go” an investigation into fired national security adviser Michael Flynn and his ties to the Kremlin.
After US media reported the conversation, the president warned Mr Comey in a tweet, saying he “better hope there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations”.
Mr Comey told the committee he hoped there were tapes, calling on Mr Trump to release them.
“The president surely knows whether he taped me, and if he did my feelings aren’t hurt. Release all the tapes, I’m good with it,” he said.
The White House has refused to say whether any such tapes exist.
After Mr Trump’s tweet about potential tapes, Mr Comey said he realised it was important to release his own account of the story.
President Trump’s statement: He was not under investigation and never said ‘let Flynn go’
He revealed that he asked a “good friend of mine” who is a professor at Columbia Law School to share contents of the memo with a reporter, in order to build pressure for a special counsel.
As a result of this episode, former FBI chief Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to lead an independent investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential ties to the Kremlin.
Mr Comey said he was “sure” Mr Mueller was also looking at whether Mr Trump obstructed justice.
Mr Trump attacked Mr Comey for leaking the documents, saying it showed that members of the US government are “actively attempting to undermine this administration”.
What’s the reaction?
“He’s new in government, and so therefore I think he’s learning as he goes,” said Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. “I’m not saying it’s an acceptable excuse. It’s just my observation.”
“If you want to convict the president of being inappropriate, putting Comey in a bad spot, being rude, crude and a bull in a china shop, you would win,” Senator Lindsey Graham told the BBC.
“The American people elected a bull in a china shop to help them with their lives, not this.”
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said “it’s hard to overstate the impact of Jim Comey’s testimony today” and that “it seems like the walls are closing in”.
SOURCE – BBC
Comey Bluntly Raises Possibility of Trump Obstruction and Condemns His ‘Lies’
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By MATT APUZZO and EMMARIE HUETTEMANJUNE 8, 2017
“Those were lies, plain and simple,” James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, discussing White House explanations for his firing .
Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — James B. Comey, the recently fired F.B.I. director, said Thursday in an extraordinary Senate hearing that he believed President Trump had tried to derail an investigation into his national security adviser, and accused the president of lying and defaming him and the F.B.I.
Mr. Comey, no longer constrained by the formalities of a government job, offered a blunt, plain-spoken assessment of a president whose conversations unnerved him from the day they met, weeks before Mr. Trump took office.
The James Comey who emerged during the hearing was by turns humble, folksy and matter-of-fact, but at the same time, he proved that underneath was a shrewd politician not afraid to play the Washington game by leaking information on his own.
In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, he provided an unflattering back story to his abrupt dismissal and raised the question of whether Mr. Trump had tried to obstruct justice.
Answering that falls to the Justice Department special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Comey said he had given all of his memos about his interactions with the president to Mr. Mueller, who he believed would look into the possibility of obstruction. It was the first public suggestion that prosecutors would investigate the president.
“That’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work towards, to try and understand what the intention was there and whether that’s an offense,” Mr. Comey said.
Firing Mr. Comey ignited an unexpected political fire for the president, and Mr. Comey acknowledged helping fan the flames. He said he had encouraged a friend to give The New York Times details from one of his memos, a move he hoped would lead to the appointment of a special counsel. It did.
Before firing Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump was dogged by the F.B.I. inquiry into his campaign’s ties to Russia. But he was never personally under investigation.
James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee.June 8, 2017. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
Now, he faces the prospect of an obstruction investigation, inquiries by emboldened congressional officials and questions from both parties about whether he tried inappropriately to end the F.B.I. inquiry into Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser.
Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, flatly denied any obstruction. “The president never, in form or substance, directed or suggested that Mr. Comey stop investigating anyone,” he said.
But Mr. Kasowitz’s involvement was itself a reflection of how Mr. Comey’s firing had deepened the president’s political and legal difficulties. Mr. Trump hired him recently to help contain the fallout.
The Senate hearing did not help that effort. It was the most highly anticipated and crowded congressional event in recent memory.
Over a long career, Mr. Comey has excelled at telling his story while tiptoeing around Washington’s bureaucratic minefields. He has been so at ease before Congress that some staff members have jokingly called him “Senator Comey.” But this time, he offered more frank, emotional introspection than he had before.
He set that tone from the beginning, opening with a goodbye to his former employees, to whom he was unable to personally bid farewell. And he said Mr. Trump had lied — a word that is often soft-pedaled in Washington — when he justified the firing by saying Mr. Comey had lost the confidence of an F.B.I. in disarray. “Those were lies, plain and simple,” Mr. Comey said.
He said the president had defamed him, an apparent reference to Mr. Trump’s calling him a “nut job” in a private meeting with Russian diplomats.
And when Republicans asked why he had not told the president he was out of line for asking Mr. Comey to “see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Comey said perhaps he should have.
Senators Mark Warner, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Richard Burr, chairman of the committee, listening to Mr. Comey’s testimony. Al Drago/The New York Times
“I don’t want to sound like I’m Captain Courageous,” he replied. “I don’t know whether, even if I had the presence of mind, I would have said to the president, ‘Sir, that’s wrong.’”
But he said he had no doubt about Mr. Trump’s intentions. “I took it as a direction,” he said. If the president had his way, Mr. Comey said, “we would have dropped an open criminal investigation.”
Mr. Comey’s testimony forced Mr. Trump’s supporters into the uncomfortable position of drawing a distinction between suggesting that the F.B.I. close an investigation into a friend and outright ordering it.
“Knowing my father for 39 years when he ‘orders or tells’ you to do something there is no ambiguity, you will know exactly what he means,” the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter during the hearing.
Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, is investigating Mr. Flynn along with the broad question of whether the Trump campaign helped Russian operatives meddle in the presidential election.
Mr. Comey placed the origins of the special counsel investigation squarely on Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, a frequent source of conflict for the president. Two days after Mr. Comey was ousted, The Times reported that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Comey to pledge loyalty to him. The president then tweeted that Mr. Comey had “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’” of their meetings.
That tweet inspired Mr. Comey to allow a friend to read portions of his memo to The Times. A day after The Times revealed the contents of that memo, which described the conversation about Mr. Flynn, the Justice Department appointed Mr. Mueller to take over the investigation.
The White House has not commented on whether recordings exist. But Mr. Comey repeatedly baited Mr. Trump to produce them if they did. “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” he said at the hearing. “The president surely knows if there are tapes. If there are, my feelings aren’t hurt. Release the tapes.”
Mr. Trump has offered changing reasons for firing Mr. Comey. The White House originally cited Mr. Comey’s handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, saying Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, had recommended he be dismissed. But Mr. Trump quickly undercut that argument, telling NBC News that he had been thinking about the Russia investigation when he fired Mr. Comey.
Asked why he was fired, Mr. Comey replied: “I take the president at his word — that I was fired because of the Russia investigation. Something about the way I was conducting it, the president felt, created pressure on him that he wanted to relieve.”
Mr. Comey questioned why Mr. Sessions had been involved in the discussions about his firing, given that Mr. Sessions had recused himself from the Russia case after his undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States were revealed. “If, as the president said, I was fired because of the Russia investigation, why was the attorney general involved in that chain?” Mr. Comey asked. “I don’t know.”
The Justice Department said Thursday that Mr. Sessions had been involved because the firing was related to concerns about Mr. Comey’s leadership and had nothing to do with any inquiry.
Mr. Comey also described his disappointment when the president asked that they be left alone after a meeting in the Oval Office with national security officials. Mr. Sessions stayed behind at first, but then left. “My sense was the attorney general knew he shouldn’t be leaving, which is why he was lingering,” Mr. Comey said. He testified that he later told Mr. Sessions to never again leave him alone with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Kasowitz said Mr. Trump had never sought a loyalty pledge, as Mr. Comey told the Senate. And he portrayed Mr. Comey as part of a stealth campaign to undermine Mr. Trump. “It is overwhelmingly clear that there have been and continue to be those in government who are actively attempting to undermine this administration with selective and illegal leaks of classified information and privileged communications,” he said. “Mr. Comey has now admitted that he is one of these leakers.”
Mr. Comey’s memo was not classified, and the White House did not assert executive privilege over his conversations with Mr. Trump.
Though Mr. Comey told Mr. Trump three times that he was not under investigation, he said others at the F.B.I. had argued against offering that assurance. Because the F.B.I. was investigating possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, one official argued, Mr. Trump’s activity would necessarily be scrutinized. Nevertheless, Mr. Comey said, “I thought it was fair to say what was literally true: There is not a counterintelligence investigation of Mr. Trump.”
But Mr. Comey said he had distrusted Mr. Trump from the first time they met, at Trump Tower before Inauguration Day. Mr. Comey ended the day in an F.B.I. vehicle, taking detailed notes about his conversations. “I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting,” he said, “and so I thought it really important to document.”
Then, in February, when Mr. Trump cleared the Oval Office to talk about Mr. Flynn, Mr. Comey described an ominous feeling. “My impression was, something big is about to happen,” he said. “I need to remember every single word that is spoken.”
SOURCE – THE NEW YORK TIMES