It’s not hard to understand why Donald Trump was frustrated with FBI director James Comey. In the weeks before the inauguration and the weeks that followed, Comey repeatedly told Trump that he was not under investigation as part of the FBI’s probe into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election. But when Trump urged Comey to say so publicly, to help quell a steady stream of media reports suggesting otherwise, the director refused. Top White House officials took up the cause, lobbying Comey and his associates to be more transparent and to spare the new president unfounded accusations.
To Trump, Comey’s unwillingness to say publicly what he would say in private was a profound demonstration of bad faith. It was, he believed, another indication that the law enforcement and intelligence communities were out to get him. And it is hard to blame him after the spate of leaks that have characterized the investigation.
But Trump himself bears responsibility for the events that led to Comey’s dramatic, high-stakes testimony about these investigations on Capitol Hill last week. The current scandal is a uniquely Trumpian affair, precipitated and exacerbated by the president’s erratic social media habits, his eagerness to make threats and propagate conspiracies, and his public dishonesty.
Immediately upon leaving his first one-on-one meeting with Trump, at Trump Tower on January 6, Comey logged on to a classified computer and memorialized their conversation in a memo to file. Comey testified that he hadn’t kept such careful notes during his government service under George W. Bush or Barack Obama. Why did he do it this time? Well, he answered, the seriousness of the subject matter was a factor. So, too, was the credibility of his interlocutor or, as Comey put it, “the nature of the person.” “I was honestly concerned,” Comey told lawmakers, “that he might lie about the nature of our meeting so I thought it really important to document.”
This was a reasonable concern. Trump lies all the time, about matters big and small, significant and insignificant. He lies when he cannot possibly be contradicted, and he lies when there is irrefutable evidence that he’s lying. Even judged against professional politicians, Trump is a notably prolific and aggressive liar. His victory in November seemed to suggest that there might be no consequences for his mendacity. But the memos Comey wrote to record the details of his conversations with the president—memos that would be admissible in a court of law as credible, contemporaneous accounts of their interactions, and memos that could play a significant role in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation—tell us such a conclusion may well have been premature.
According to Comey, on February 14 at a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office, Trump asked him to end the FBI’s probe of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the Trump campaign adviser who had gone on to serve as the administration’s first national security adviser. Trump had no idea what kind of evidence the FBI had on Flynn and seems to have based his request on a benefit-of-the-doubt supposition about Flynn’s behavior. Trump’s lawyer denies Comey’s claim, but it’s consistent with Trump’s public calls for an end to the Flynn investigation.
Just days after Trump fired Comey, the president threatened the ex-FBI director in what seems to have been an ill-conceived effort to intimidate him. “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump tweeted on May 12.
This tweet—and the bullying indiscipline behind it—helped lead to the special counsel investigation that will preoccupy the Trump administration for months, maybe for years. Comey testified that Trump’s tweet led him to go public with one of the memos he’d drafted, in case Trump tried to mischaracterize their conversations.
“The president tweeted on Friday after I got fired that I better hope there’s not tapes,” Comey recalled. “I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape. My judgment was: I need to get that out into the public square. I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter—didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons. I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”
While Trump will undoubtedly seek to shift blame in order to avoid responsibility for his current ordeal, he lacks the credibility to do so convincingly. It is his own words that are haunting him.
