Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he urged President Trump to remove James Comey as the head of the FBI in the early days of his administration.
Comey has been criticized following the release of documents that outlined the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Gen. Michael Flynn, including documents that revealed the agency considered prosecuting the general before interviewing him. During a Thursday interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Sessions said he advised Trump to get rid of Comey from day one.
“I don’t talk about what I tell the president, but I think people knew that I felt he should not continue from virtually day one of the administration,” Sessions said. “When I was asked by the president about it, it didn’t take me 30 seconds to say, ‘my recommendation is that he be removed.'”
Sessions said he did not trust Comey to lead the FBI, saying, “Jim Comey did not believe he was bound by the rules. He thought he was above the rules. I did not feel good about his leadership at the FBI.”
“Those notes [on Flynn’s case] go back to Comey. Those are meetings that he led,” Sessions later added. “When they talked about conducting this interview, and, as he said, he sent them in, and he wouldn’t have done it against Obama. He wouldn’t have done it against Bush. It was in the first days of this administration, and that’s why he did it.”
Trump and Sessions had a strained relationship because of Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election. Sessions is running to regain his Alabama Senate seat in 2020.
