What did we learn from James Comey, the fired FBI director, when he testified on June 8 before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee? Not enough to prove Donald Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors warranting impeachment, as the president’s most strident opponents were hoping. Neither did Comey’s testimony vindicate Trump of ethical wrongdoing or inappropriate behavior, as the White House had claimed it would.
The truth is more complex. In Comey’s telling, the president leaned hard on his FBI director to rein in the investigation of Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Comey said he took the president’s February 14 words—”I hope you can let this go”—as a direction to do so. He also claimed that Trump asked for Comey’s loyalty during a private dinner in January. “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” said Trump.
Trump, through his lawyer Marc Kasowitz, denied these claims. “The president never, in form or substance, directed or suggested that Mr. Comey stop investigating anyone, including suggesting that Mr. Comey ‘let Flynn go,’ ” said Kasowitz following Comey’s public testimony. “The president also never told Mr. Comey, ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty’ in form or substance.”
This is a simple dispute. In the broadest terms, either Comey perjured himself in front of Congress or his characterization of those conversations is accurate. If it’s the former, a long-serving law enforcement officer with a sterling reputation threw all of that away in a misguided attempt to sink the president who fired him.
If it’s the latter, at the very least it shows Trump was either unaware of or felt unconstrained by the guardrails of propriety, the independence of federal law enforcement, or even his own best interests.
During his testimony, Comey definitively said that no other members of the Trump administration asked him to drop the Flynn investigation—no one from the White House staff, the Department of Justice, the National Security Agency, or the office of the director of national intelligence. If there was an order for Comey to stop the investigation, it came from the president alone.
What is open to interpretation is whether what Trump said about the Flynn inquiry rises to the level of obstruction of justice. Barring new evidence, it arguably does not. But if they win majorities in Congress in the 2018 midterm, Democrats eager to oust Trump from office will likely argue that it does.
Comey’s testimony further suggested that there remain numerous questions for members of the administration to answer. When asked about the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the Russia investigation, Comey hinted that Sessions had a “variety of reasons” to do so beyond his undisclosed meetings with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. “We also were aware of facts that I can’t discuss in an open setting that would make his continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic,” Comey continued. Reports out of Comey’s closed-session testimony before the committee say that there may have been a third undisclosed meeting between Sessions and Kislyak.
We also learned that the feds are investigating Michael Flynn’s statements to the FBI about his communications with Kislyak. Asked whether Flynn lied to or misled the FBI, Comey demurred, saying that question was the “subject of the criminal inquiry.”
Comey explained why he felt compelled to write detailed memos following his one-on-one meetings with the president, a practice he did not maintain during the three-and-a-half years he worked for Barack Obama. “The subject matter I was talking about, matters that touch on the FBI’s core responsibility, and that relate to the president, president-elect personally, and then the nature of the person,” Comey said. “I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting so I thought it really important to document. That combination of things I had never experienced before, but had led me to believe I’ve got to write it down and I’ve got to write it down in a very detailed way.”
Perhaps the most revealing part of Comey’s testimony was his admission that after he was fired he leaked one of these memos to a friend. On Friday, May 12, three days after he had ousted Comey, Trump tweeted that his former FBI director “better hope” there were no tapes of their conversations. Comey decided to call Trump’s bluff and gave the memo documenting his February 14 meeting at the White House to Columbia law professor Daniel Richman, who then described its contents to a New York Times reporter. The Times published the bombshell news of the Comey memos on May 16.
In his testimony last week, Comey was matter-of-fact in his reasoning for the leak. “I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel,” he said. The day after the Times story ran, the Justice Department did exactly that when it tapped Robert Mueller as special counsel.
Michael Warren is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
