Former President Donald Trump told Fox News that his firing of former FBI Director James Comey was critical to his surviving four years in the White House.
Said Trump: “If I didn’t fire Comey, they were looking to take down the president of the United States.”
He added: “A lot of people tell me, ‘how you survived is the most incredible thing.’ I fired Comey. Had I not fired Comey you might not be talking to me right now…”
Former FBI Director James Comey gave MSNBC his reaction on the Justice Department inspector general’s report that found no FBI bias in the Russia probe.
Said Comey: “It was all made up. Two years of sitting silently at the FBI while you are lied about and finally the truth is out. It was lies. There was no treason. There was no conspiracy. There was no tapping of Trump’s wires. There was no putting informants in the campaign. It was all nonsense. And the FBI finally has its day with the American people and I hope they pay attention to it.”
Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent: The inspector general report just blew up Trump’s lies. So Barr is rushing to the rescue.
Former FBI Director James Comey told KCRA that he hopes Congress won’t impeach President Trump.
Said Comey: “I think the American people would be let off the hook”
Writing for Lawfare, former FBI director James Comey lists the questions he would ask former special counsel Robert Mueller next week in his much-anticipated House testimony.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked Attorney General William Barr at this morning’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing if he had a problem with how FBI Director James Comey handled the Clinton email case during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Barr responded: “Yes, I said so at the time.”
However, just days before the 2016 presidential election, Barr actually defended Comey in a Washington Post op-ed saying the FBI Director “did the right thing.”
Former FBI Director James Comey asked American voters to end Donald Trump’s presidency with a “landslide” victory for his opponent in 2020, CNN reports.
“He all but begged Democrats to set aside their ideological differences and nominate the person best suited to defeating Trump in an election.”
Said Comey: “I understand the Democrats have important debates now over who their candidate should be, but they have to win. They have to win.”
President Trump lashed out at James Comey on Twitter, accusing the former FBI director of lying during his testimony to House lawmakers about the investigation into Russia’s election interference.
Said Trump: “Leakin’ James Comey must have set a record for who lied the most to Congress in one day. His Friday testimony was so untruthful!”
He added: “This whole deal is a Rigged Fraud headed up by dishonest people who would do anything so that I could not become President. They are now exposed!”
Former FBI Director James Comey “has reached an agreement with Republican lawmakers to testify behind closed doors about investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email server and whether President Trump’s campaign advisers colluded with the Russian government to steer the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” the New York Times reports.
“Republican lawmakers agreed to release a transcript of his testimony in 24 hours and to allow Mr. Comey to speak about the meeting publicly, he said on Twitter.”
Said Comey: “This is the closest I can get to public testimony,”
“He may not be the sharpest knife in our drawer, but he can see his future and knows that if he acted in an extralegal way, he would go down in history for the wrong reasons. I’m sure he doesn’t want that.”
— Former FBI Director James Comey, in a WGBH interview, on acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker.
“President Trump told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political adversaries: his 2016 challenger, Hillary Clinton, and the former F.B.I. director James Comey,” the New York Times reports.
“The lawyer, Donald McGahn, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution. Mr. McGahn said that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power.”
President Trump said that he regrets not firing FBI Director James Comey sooner, “asserting that he should have done so while still a candidate for president — an option that was not actually available to him,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Trump: “If I did one mistake with Comey, I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him right after the convention, say I don’t want that guy. Or at least fired him the first day on the job. … I would have been better off firing him or putting out a statement that I don’t want him there when I get there.”
Rudy Giuliani said “that the president never had a conversation last year with James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, about ending the investigation into the fired national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, contradicting a memo Mr. Comey wrote at the time,” the New York Times reports.
However, Giuliani’s statement “appeared at odds with his own previous comments… Last month, when pressed on ABC News by George Stephanopoulos about whether Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey he hoped he could see his way to ending the Flynn case, Mr. Giuliani interrupted him to say that Mr. Trump did not say that. ‘What he said to him was, “Can you give him a break?”’ Mr. Giuliani said in that interview.”
Lawyers for President Trump unleashed a blistering attack on former FBI Director James Comey in a confidential memo last year to the special counsel, casting him as “Machiavellian,” dishonest and “unbounded by law and regulation” as they sought to undermine the credibility of a law enforcement leader they see as a critical witness against the president, the AP reports.
Jennifer Palmieri: “I am not sure there is a word in the English language to describe how I felt when I read that Comey had occasionally used his personal Gmail account to conduct official business. I’d felt the same sense of outrage and helplessness when I heard members of the press lament the outsized attention Clinton’s emails got during the campaign.”
“I won’t re-litigate the coverage of Clinton’s emails here (and how I believe suspicion of the motivations of a woman seeking power is at the root of the email controversy), but I can’t help but wonder we don’t now distrust Comey’s the way people distrusted Clinton. (Hint: It has more to do with his gender and her ambitions than his email.)”
President Trump, during a semi-surprise appearance on Fox & Friends, said that the Justice Department’s inspector general report, which ultimately concluded that then-FBI Director James Comey was not politically biased, was wrong, and that what Comey did “was criminal.”
Said Trump: “I think Comey was the ringleader of this… den of thieves.”
He added: “You look at what happened, they were plotting against my election. I’m actually proud because I beat the Clinton Dynasty, I beat Bush Dynasty, Now, I guess, hopefully I’m in the process of beating very dishonest intelligence.”
“Former FBI Director James Comey, who famously criticized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for using personal email, used his own personal email account and laptop to conduct FBI business,” the HuffPost reports.
“The DOJ inspector general’s report released on Thursday found that Comey’s use of a personal Gmail address was ‘inconsistent’ with FBI policy.”
The Justice Department’s inspector general found that former FBI Director James Comey “deviated” from FBI and Justice Department procedures in handling the probe into Hillary Clinton, damaging the law enforcement agencies’ image of impartiality even though he wasn’t motivated by political bias, Bloomberg reports.
From the report: “While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice.”
“The Justice Department’s internal watchdog has concluded that James Comey defied authority at times during his tenure as FBI director,” ABC News reports.
One source says the draft report explicitly uses the word “insubordinate” to describe Comey’s behavior.
“The draft… specifically called out Comey for ignoring objections from the Justice Department when he disclosed in a letter to Congress just days before the 2016 presidential election that FBI agents had reopened the Clinton probe… Clinton has said that letter doomed her campaign.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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