The FBI director kept written records of interactions with Trump that struck him as inappropriate. The memos are starting to leak.
James Comey keeps his receipts. When the Bush administration pursued a warrantless wiretapping program that struck him as unconstitutional, he made sure to keep a written record of his dissent for posterity.
And when Donald Trump asked him to consider ending both the FBI’s investigation into Michael Flynn — and the First Ammendment as we’ ve known it — Comey dutifully did the same. As the New York Times reports:
The White House disputes this account. (But, then, the White House disputes a lot of things .)
Trump’s decision to fire Comey last week sparked widespread concerns that the president intended to undermine the independence of federal law enforcement, so as to kill the ongoing investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russian hackers. Those concerns were exacerbated by the president’s subsequent decision to say, in a nationally televised interview, “In fact when I decided to just [fire Comey] , I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’ ”
Flynn lost his White House gig after news leaked that he had surreptitiously discussed sanctions relief with Russia’s ambassador while president Obama was still in office, and then (reportedly) lied to Vice-President Pence about it. Since then, the House Oversight Committee has concluded that Flynn’s acceptance of payments from the Turkish and Russian governments was likely illegal.
According to the Times, Comey kept a paper record of every time the president improperly attempted to influence an investigation.
The report published Tuesday is based on a partial transcript of (just) one of those memos.
