A friend of former FBI Director James Comey said President Trump should be scared of the former director’s testimony that he plans to deliver to lawmakers next month.
“This guy has a story to tell,” Benjamin Wittes said of Comey in an interview on CNN on Tuesday night. “If I were Donald Trump, that would scare me a lot.”
Wittes, a friend to Comey and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Tuesday he found it “very telling” that the former FBI director decided not to testify before a Senate panel on the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Friend of James Comey says the ex-FBI Director felt Trump was trying to “make a loyalist out of him” https://t.co/aqohyq9IdR
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) May 24, 2017
The Senate Intelligence Committee invited Comey to testify in a closed session, which he declined. He will meet with the committee publicly after Memorial Day.
Wittes said he decided to share his conversations with Comey after a report revealed Trump asked the former FBI director to pledge loyalty to him. The report, Wittes said, presented his discussions with Comey in a new light.
“I was very shocked and it certainly crystallized in my mind what a whole lot of these interactions that I have had with him meant and why he had reacted to them the way he had reacted,” Wittes said. “I suddenly understood them in a different and frankly, a more menacing and upsetting light than I had at the time of the conversation.”
Trump fired Comey earlier this month.
