Former FBI director James Comey is testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee about of his meetings with President Donald Trump and whether the president pressured him to abandon a probe touching on White House relations with Russia.
In an unusual move, the committee released Comey’s prepared remarks on Wednesday afternoon. The seven-page document outlines his relationship with Trump, some details of which had already been leaked to the press in the weeks following his firing, including that the president asked Comey for his loyalty.
Trump fired Comey on May 9, faulting him for failing to find intelligence community leakers feeding information to the media.
The vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner (D-VA), says this is not a “witch hunt” or “fake news,” but rather an effort to protect the US from a “new threat” which will not be going away anytime soon.
Comey said that although he understood when he was hired in 2013 that he “could be fired by the president for any reason or no reason at all,” the “shifting explanations” he was later told “confused me and increasingly concerned me.”
He said that President Trump repeatedly told him that he had “talked to lots of people” about him, and that he had learned Comey was doing a “great job.”
“So it confused me when I saw on TV that the president fired me because of the Russian investigation,” he said.
