Former FBI Director James Comey said he documented his meetings with President Trump because he worried he’d have to defend himself and the FBI publicly over those conversations because Trump “might lie,” a feeling he never had with previous presidents with whom he worked.
“I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting,” Comey said.
“I knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what would had happened, not just to defend myself but to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution,” he said.
Comey added he’d very rarely spoke with other presidents without anyone else present. He said in three years as FBI director under President Barack Obama, he had only spoken with him twice when they were alone and only spoke with President George W. Bush once when he was serving as deputy attorney general.
“As FBI director, I interacted with President Obama, I spoke only twice in three years and didn’t document it,” he said. “When I was deputy attorney general, I had one one-on-one meeting with President Bush about a very important and difficult national security matter. I didn’t write a memo documenting that conversation either.”
He added, “I didn’t feel with President Bush the need to document it in that way because the combination of those factors just wasn’t resent with either President Bush or President Obama.”
