Long before President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, the commander in chief asked Comey to pledge loyalty to him. Comey declined, according to a report Thursday.
A week after Trump was sworn in as president he had a private dinner with Comey, the New York Times reports citing two people who heard Comey’s account of that meal.
During the dinner, the conversation about the 2016 election and crowd sizes took a turn to the question of loyalty. Though Comey turned Trump down on the question of loyalty, Comey did say he would always be honest with the president. Comey said he was not “‘reliable’ in the conventional political sense,” the Times said.
The report says Comey, who was an Obama nominee with six years left to serve, believes that it was from this moment that his time as FBI director would run short.
Trump fired Comey on Tuesday after receiving a recommendation from the Justice Department to do so.
As recently as April, Trump said that he still had “confidence” in Comey but also suggested that it wasn’t too late to fire him. That was following Comey’s reveal that the FBI was probing possible ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and a report on the agency obtaining a FISA warrant to tap into the communications of former Trump adviser Carter Page.
Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt on Thursday that he has long known that he was going to fire Comey, even before the Justice Department recommendation.
