Former FBI Director James Comey hopes that President Trump recorded their conversations, he told lawmakers Thursday.
“I’ve seen the tweet about tapes — Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” Comey said during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
That was a direct reference to a tweet Trump wrote following the Comey’s firing, as anonymous allies of the ousted chief began to release information implying the president had made inappropriate requests of Comey. “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” the president tweeted.
Comey wants the “tapes” to corroborate his claim that Trump asked him to drop a criminal investigation into Mike Flynn, the former White House national security adviser who had been fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with a Russian diplomat. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump said.
“I replied only that ‘he is a good guy,'” the former FBI director wrote in his written statement for the committee.
Those conversations are a focal point of the political investigation into Comey’s firing, which some Democrats have suggested amounts to an attempt to obstruct justice. One Democrat suggested that Comey himself mishandled the moment.
“Why didn’t you stop and say, ‘Mr. President this is wrong, I cannot discuss this with you,'” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked.
“Maybe if I were stronger, I would have,” he replied. “I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took it in . . . I remember saying, ‘I agree he is a good guy,’ as a way of saying ‘I’m not agreeing with what you just asked me to do.’ Maybe other people would be stronger in that circumstance, but that’s how I conducted myself. I hope I’ll never have another opportunity, maybe if I did it again I’ll do it better.”
Feinstein also asked Comey to elaborate on another encounter with Trump, when the director says the president wanted him to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation by publicizing that Trump is not a direct target of the probe — a request Comey answered by saying he would “see what we could do,” according to the statement.
“That was kind of a slightly cowardly way of trying to avoid telling him, ‘we’re not going to do that,’ that I would see what we could do,” Comey replied. “It was a way of kind of getting off the phone, frankly, and then I turned and handed it to the acting deputy attorney general, [Dana] Boente.”
Comey returned to the subject of the tapes when explaining he didn’t tell any superiors at the Justice Department because it appeared likely that Attorney General Jeff Sessions would have to recuse himself from the investigation and there were no other Senate-confirmed officials at DOJ.
“Our view at the time was, ‘look, it’s your word against the president’s; there’s no way to corroborate this,'” he said. “My view of that changed when the prospect of tapes was raised, but that’s how we thought about it then.”
