Special counsel Robert Mueller found White House press secretary Sarah Sanders lied to the media when she said former FBI Director James Comey was fired in part because “countless” members of the FBI had lost confidence in him.
The finding was described in the redacted report released by the Justice Department on Thursday.
“Sanders told the press after Comey’s termination that the White House had heard from ‘countless’ FBI agents who had lost confidence in Comey. But the evidence does not support those claims,” reads a section of Mueller’s report analyzing President Trump’s decision to fire Comey.
“The President told Comey at their January 27 dinner that ‘the people of the FBI really like [him],’ no evidence suggests that the President heard otherwise before deciding to terminate Comey, and Sanders acknowledged to investigators that her comments were not founded on anything,” the report added.
Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017, and eight days later, special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.
At the time, Trump said he fired Comey upon the recommendation of both Sessions and Rosenstein over Comey’s mishandling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 campaign.
Rosenstein issued a memo at the time which focused “mistakes” Comey made in the investigation of Clinton’s unauthorized email server. Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe later claimed that Rosenstein privately complained about having to write the memo for Trump.
At the time, Sanders said she spoke with “countless” FBI agents who said they were “grateful” that Comey was fired. She added at the time that she heard from “a large number” and doesn’t “even know that many people in the FBI.”
McCabe wrote an article February in the Atlantic in which he disputed Trump’s and Sander’s narrative of Comey’s firing. McCabe said Trump called him saying he “received hundreds of messages” from FBI employees telling him how “happy” they were that Comey was fired. McCabe countered.
“This is what it was like: You could go to any floor and you would see small groups gathering in hallways, some people even crying,” McCabe said. “The overwhelming majority liked and admired Director Comey — his personal style, the integrity of his conduct. Now we were laboring under the same dank, gray shadow that had been creeping over Washington during the few months Donald Trump had been in office.”
After Barr delivered a press conference on Thursday, the Justice Department released the 400-page-plus Mueller report to the public Thursday. The report represents the culmination of an almost two-year investigation into collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government.
The report found there was “no collusion” but also detailed an extensive amount of interference into the 2016 election by the Russian government and 10 instances of possible obstruction by Trump that Mueller examined.
The Washington Examiner has reached out to Sanders for comment.
