Former FBI Director James Comey’s high-profile testimony Thursday is sure to provide plenty of red meat for partisans on both sides of the aisle in Washington.
There were plenty of revealing details about President Trump in Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee — that he wrote memos about his conversations with Trump because he feared Trump “might lie” publicly, that he leaked those memos to the press through a friend, even that he had to cancel a date with his wife to have an awkward dinner with Trump.
But, at the same time, Comey pegged Democrats back by saying President Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, told him not to call the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails an investigation and felt she was spinning the FBI’s investigation for political purposes.
He also hurt the Democrats’ claim that Trump colluded with Russia during the election by saying dropping the investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn wouldn’t have hurt the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in 2016.
Comey started off the hearing by throwing haymakers at Trump.
He said the president “told lies” to “defame me,” and then blasted Trump’s character in comparison to Presidents Obama and George W. Bush. He said he had never felt the need to document one-on-one meetings with those previous presidents because he felt they were men of high character, whereas Trump could lie.
“I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting so I thought it important to document,” Comey said. “That combination of things I had never experienced before, but had led me to believe I got to write it down and write it down in a very detailed way.”
Later, Comey said he felt Trump — who said he “hoped” Comey would let the investigation into Flynn go — was trying to direct him to end the investigation into the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. While Comey wouldn’t call that an obstruction of justice, he certainly felt that Trump was trying to influence his investigation.
“I mean, this is a president of the United States with me alone saying I hope this,” Comey said. “I took it as, this is what he wants me to do. I didn’t obey that, but that’s the way I took it.”
The former FBI director even called out Trump over a tweet the president sent following Comey’s dismissal alluding to possible recordings of their conversations.
Trump had said Comey better be careful about what he told the press because there might be tapes of those conversations between them.
“Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” Comey said, calling on Trump to release them if he recorded those talks.
There was also a moment that might provide a bit more tension in the Department of Justice after a week of questions over the relationship between Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump.
Comey, who often begged out of answering questions because he didn’t want to give away too much information in a public setting, said the FBI knew of something that would cause Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in the election.
“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,” he said.
But, Republicans will seize on Comey’s revelations about the investigation into Clinton’s email server and the role the Obama Department of Justice played in his investigation.
He said Lynch’s meeting with former President Bill Clinton on a tarmac in Phoenix caused him to work independently of the Department of Justice on the Clinton investigation. He said he felt Lynch was trying to align the FBI’s description of its investigation with Clinton’s messaging in a bid to help her with the 2016 presidential election.
“I don’t know whether it was intentional or not, but it gave the impression that the attorney general was trying to align how we describe our work,” he said.
Lynch’s request to call the investigation a “matter” and not an investigation gave him “a queasy feeling,” Comey said.
Comey also tamped down claims by Democrats that Trump directly worked with Russian President Vladimir Putin to win the election.
In response to a question from independent Maine Sen. Angus King, Comey said the criminal investigation into Flynn and the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election were “touching each other, but separate.”
Flynn is widely believed to be a person who would have been a link between the Kremlin and the Trump camp. He gave speeches in Russia and was eventually fired from his post as national security adviser because he lied about the nature of his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States.
While Comey’s prepared testimony indicated Trump told him he hoped he could end the Flynn investigation, that wasn’t enough for Comey to call it an obstruction of justice.
“I don’t think it’s for me to say if the conversation with the president was an effort to obstruct,” he said, adding that he’d leave it to Special Counsel Robert Mueller to determine that. “I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning.”
Comey even got in on some good ol’ fashioned press-bashing by calling a New York Times report from February that there were numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin “not true” and ripping the use anonymous sources.
“The challenge, and I’m not picking on reporters about writing stories about classified information, is the people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on, and going on are not talking about it,” he said. “We don’t call the press to say, hey, you don’t that thing wrong about the sensitive topic. We have to leave it there.”
