Former FBI Director James Comey rejected the claim that he went “rogue” in dispatching agents to interview then-White House national security adviser Michael Flynn during the early days of the Trump administration.
He was asked on Wednesday during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates criticizing him for “acting unilaterally” by not notifying her in advance about the FBI’s interview of retired Lt. Gen. Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017.
“It is not accurate,” Comey, who was sworn in and who testified via video conference, said in response to the question from Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana.
“Well, why would she say that? She sure didn’t compliment you. I was sitting right here, bigger than Dallas, listening to her. She said you went rogue,” Kennedy said. “What do you think about that?”
Comey said he believes Yates was “disappointed that I didn’t coordinate the Flynn interview with her in advance” but claimed that “she understood my explanation afterwards as to why I used my authority, which I had, to do it without coordinating.”
Yates told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August that the FBI interview of Flynn was done without her authorization.
“I was upset that Director Comey didn’t coordinate that with us and acted unilaterally,” Yates said.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican and the chairman of the committee, asked Yates, “Did Comey go rogue?”
“You could use that term, yes,” Yates responded.
“The purpose of this meeting was for the president to find out whether, based on the calls between Ambassador Kislyak and Gen. Flynn, the transition team needed to be careful about what it was sharing with Gen. Flynn,” Yates said of a Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting.
Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to FBI investigators about his December 2016 conversations with a Russian envoy. But after changing legal teams, Flynn claimed he was innocent and had been set up by the FBI. The Justice Department has moved to dismiss the case.
Comey admitted in 2018 that he took advantage of the chaos in the early days of Trump’s administration when he sent now-fired FBI agent Peter Strzok and another FBI agent believed to be Joseph Pientka to talk to Flynn, who was a target of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in late January 2017.
“I sent them,” Comey said to MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace, prompting laughter from the audience. “Something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in … a more organized administration. In the George W. Bush administration, for example, or the Obama administration.”
“In both of those administrations, there was process, and so, if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel, and there’d be discussions and approvals and who would be there, and I thought, it’s early enough. Let’s just send a couple guys over,” he added.
Earlier this year, the DOJ moved to dismiss the case against Flynn but has met heavy resistance from the presiding judge. A court filing in May described the clash between Comey and Yates on the question of whether to tell the incoming Trump administration that the recording of Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador did not entirely square up with what Flynn had apparently told incoming Vice President Mike Pence.
Comey “took the position that the FBI would not notify the incoming Trump administration of the Flynn-Kislyak communications.” Yates and other senior DOJ officials “took the contrary view and believed that the incoming administration should be notified.” The Yates FBI interview notes indicate that the FBI’s interview with Flynn “was problematic” to her “because as a matter of protocol and as a courtesy, the White House Counsel’s Office should have been notified of the interview.” She stressed that “the FBI’s approach was inconsistent with how things had been done.”
Flynn’s lawyers have touted recently released FBI records as being exculpatory evidence that was concealed from the defense team. The documents suggest that Strzok and the FBI’s leadership stopped the bureau from closing its investigation into Flynn in early January 2017, even though investigators had uncovered “no derogatory information” after intercepts of Flynn’s communications with the Russian envoy emerged. Emails from later that month showed Strzok, along with then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page and several others, sought out ways to continue investigating Flynn, including by deploying the Logan Act.
Among the Flynn records unveiled to the public this year were handwritten notes from former FBI Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap on the day the FBI interviewed Flynn. “I believe we should rethink this,” Priestap wrote. “What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”
Newly released internal text messages sent by FBI analysts working on the case against Flynn in 2016 and 2017 reveal doubt and chaos inside the investigation, and the summary of a September interview with FBI agent William Barnett, who was the lead case agent on the Flynn case in 2016 and 2017, showed he believed the Flynn case should have been shut down in late 2016 and early 2017.
