FBI special agents from the Washington Field Office paid a visit to former FBI Director James Comey’s home on the morning of June 7, 2017, one day before he testified to Congress he had leaked his notes of conversations he had with President Trump, hoping that it would spark a special counsel investigation.
Comey gave these agents four memos as “evidence,” according to an FBI log from June 9, 2017. Three of them had a date range between February and April. A fourth, the notes say, was dated “last night at 6:30 pm.”
The specific contents of these memos weren’t disclosed in the documents obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, but some of their dates align with those that have been disclosed already, including one documenting Comey’s final conversation with Trump before being fired on May 9, 2017.
The memo with the date, “last night at 6:30 pm,” is from Jan. 28, in which Comey wrote about having dinner with Trump in the Green Room at the White House.
The notes also show Comey “spontaneously” stated to the best of his recollection that there were two other memos that were missing and which he did not hand over at that time.
Comey said that one of the memos he didn’t hand over, as he described them, matches up with a known memo about when he and other intelligence officials traveled to Trump Tower in New York City on Jan. 7 to brief then-president-elect Trump on Russian election interference efforts. Comey also suggested he may have written a memo on March 9 about an “all business” phone conversation he had with Trump, but the notes state he was less certain he had actually written anything down for this talk.
The FBI declined comment for this report.
There have been documentation of seven contemporaneous memos Comey wrote of his interactions with Trump between January and April 2017, spanning from prior to the inauguration to weeks before he was fired. They contain such claims as Trump seeking a loyalty pledge from Comey and pushing his FBI director to drop an investigation into his national security adviser Michael Flynn. Trump has vociferously denied both these accounts.
When Comey was fired, Trump initially cited a memo written by former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, which focused on the “mistakes” Comey made in handling the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized email server. But a couple days later the president suggested a different motive in an interview with NBC, saying the “Russia thing” was a factor in firing Comey.
The exact number of memos Comey wrote about his interactions with Trump remains an elusive figure. While on a book tour last spring, Comey told CNN that he had written “somewhere between five and 10.” Media and watchdog groups have fought to obtain documents relating to Comey’s notes, most of which have been deemed classified, through FOIA since May 2017, when the existence of the Comey memos was first made public.
Since being fired, Comey has been a vocal critic of the president and his treatment of the FBI.
Comey is a possible target of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigation into alleged Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse. He signed three of the four FISA applications targeting former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page before being fired by Trump. Horowitz’s report is expected to be released after Labor Day. It is also likely that Comey’s actions as FBI director will be scrutinized during the “investigation of the investigators,” a review of the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, being led by Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham.
UPDATE: This story has been corrected to reflect the memo dated “last night at 6:30 p.m.” were notes former FBI Director James Comey took on having dinner with President Trump in late January.
