The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee will start his portion of Thursday’s hearing with former FBI Director James Comey by accusing President Trump of breaking post-Watergate rules aimed at preventing White House interference with the FBI.
In excerpts released ahead of Thursday morning’s hearing, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., called Comey’s submitted testimony “disturbing.” That testimony, released Wednesday, showed that Trump was encouraging Comey to drop his probe into former national security adviser Mike Flynn, wanted Comey to publicize the fact that Trump himself was not under investigation, and asked Comey to be “loyal.”
“I do want to emphasize what is happening here — the president of the United States is asking the FBI Director to drop an ongoing investigation into the president’s former national security advisor,” Warner is expected to say.
“In further violation of clear guidelines put in place after Watergate to prevent any whiff of political interference by the White House into FBI investigations, the president then called the FBI Director on two separate occasions – March 30 and April 11 — and asked him to ‘lift the cloud’ of the Russia investigation,” Warner added.
Warner says these efforts by Trump are “not how a president of the United States behaves.”
“Regardless of the outcome of our investigation into those Russia links, Director Comey’s firing and his testimony raise separate and troubling questions that we must get to the bottom of,” he said.
