What James Comey Told Me About Donald Trump
By Benjamin Wittes
The New York Times is reporting tonight:
President Trump called the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, weeks after he took office and asked him when federal authorities were going to put out word that Mr. Trump was not personally under investigation, according to two people briefed on the call.
Mr. Comey told the president that if he wanted to know details about the bureau’s investigations, he should not contact him directly but instead follow the proper procedures and have the White House counsel send any inquires to the Justice Department, according to those people.
After explaining to Mr. Trump how communications with the F.B.I. should work, Mr. Comey believed he had effectively drawn the line after a series of encounters he had with the president and other White House officials that he felt jeopardized the F.B.I.’s independence. At the time, Mr. Comey was overseeing the investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.
I did not know this particular fact, but it doesn't surprise me at all. The principal source for the rest of this story is, well, me—specifically a long interview I gave to reporter Michael Schmidt on Friday about my conversations with FBI Director James Comey over the last few months, and particularly about one such conversation that took place on March 27 over lunch in Comey’s FBI office.
This story breaks hard on the heels of this week’s revelation—also by the Times—that Trump had asked Comey to bury the investigation of Gen. Michael Flynn. A few words of elaboration are in order.
I called Schmidt Friday morning after reading his earlier story, which ran the previous evening, about Comey’s dinner with President Trump and the President’s demands at that dinner for a vow of loyalty. Schmidt had reported that Trump requested that Comey commit to personal loyalty to the President, and that Comey declined, telling the President that he would always have Comey’s “honesty.” When I read Schmidt’s account, I immediately understood certain things Comey had said to me over the previous few months in a different, and frankly more menacing, light. While I am not in the habit of discussing with reporters my confidential communications with friends, I decided that the things Comey had told me needed to be made public.
As I told Schmidt, I did not act in any sense at Comey’s request. The information I provided, however, dovetails neatly with the Times's subsequent discovery of the personal confrontation described above between Comey and the President over investigative inquiries and inquiries directly to the Bureau from the White House.
I did this interview on the record because the President that morning was already issuing threatening tweets suggesting that Comey was leaking things, and I didn’t want any room for misunderstanding that any kind of leak had taken place with respect to the information I was providing. There was no leak from Comey, no leak from anyone else at the FBI, and no leak from anyone outside of the bureau either—just conversations between friends, the contents of which one friend is now disclosing. For the same reason, I insisted that Schmidt record the conversation and give me a copy of the recording, so that we had a good record of what was said: both what was said by Comey as reported by me, and what was said by me about the conversation. Schmidt and I have had a few clarifying phone calls since then that were not recorded.
Before I go on, let me pause briefly to explain my relationship with Comey, which has been the subject of a lot of misinformation since I disclosed that we are friends in a piece in his defense a few months back. Ever since then, and particularly since Gizmodo used me as forensic evidence in its weird effort to out a supposed Comey Twitter account, people have developed this idea that Comey and I are especially close. Some people have even started following me on Twitter because they think I’m channeling Comey or am some secret line into his thinking. The truth is rather more pedestrian: We’re friends. We communicate regularly, but I am not among his close intimates or advisers. I know nothing about the Russia investigation that isn’t public. Comey has never talked to me about a live investigative matter—and I’ve never asked him to.
That said, sometimes, as friends do, we have lunch, and when we do so, we talk about things of mutual interest, like how Lawfare is going or how life running the FBI is going. And those latter conversations necessarily involve President Trump—and President Obama before him.
Note that in the conversations I’m going to describe here, I was not interviewing Comey. There are any number of follow-up questions I would ask were I meeting him in a journalistic capacity that I did not ask. So in the conversations I’m about to relate, the answers to all questions about whether I followed up on this or that point is that I did not. I never expected to be giving a public account of his thinking during this period. I took no notes. What follows is just my recollection of things he told about his interactions with Trump that I now believe flesh out the relationship between the two men in the weeks after that dinner about which the New York Times reported and in the period in which Trump also apparently asked Comey to back off of Flynn—and in which I now learn that Comey also told the President to stop asking the FBI about investigative matters.
The first point is a general one: Comey was preoccupied throughout this period with the need to protect the FBI from these inquiries on investigative matters from the White House. Two incidents involving such inquiries have become public: the Flynn discussion and Reince Priebus’s query to Andrew McCabe about whether the then-Deputy FBI Director could publicly dispute the New York Times’ reporting regarding communications between Trump associates and Russian officials. Whether there were other such incidents I do not know, but I suspect there were. What I do know is that Comey spent a great deal of energy doing what he alternately described as “training” the White House that officials had to go through the Justice Department and “reestablishing” normal hands-off White House-Bureau relations.
Comey never said specifically that this policing was about the Russia matter, but I certainly assumed that it was—probably alongside other things. While I do not know how many incidents we’re talking about, how severe they were, or their particular character, I do know this: Comey understood Trump’s people as having neither knowledge of nor respect for the independence of the law enforcement function. And he saw it as an ongoing task on his part to protect the rest of the Bureau from improper contacts and interferences from a group of people he did not regard as honorable. This was a general preoccupation of Comey’s in the months he and Trump overlapped—and the difference between this relationship and his regard for Obama (which was deep) was profound and palpable.
Second, Comey described at least two incidents which he regarded as efforts on the part of the President personally to compromise him or implicate him with either shows of closeness or actual chumminess with the President.
(continued in next post)
By Benjamin Wittes
The New York Times is reporting tonight:
President Trump called the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, weeks after he took office and asked him when federal authorities were going to put out word that Mr. Trump was not personally under investigation, according to two people briefed on the call.
Mr. Comey told the president that if he wanted to know details about the bureau’s investigations, he should not contact him directly but instead follow the proper procedures and have the White House counsel send any inquires to the Justice Department, according to those people.
After explaining to Mr. Trump how communications with the F.B.I. should work, Mr. Comey believed he had effectively drawn the line after a series of encounters he had with the president and other White House officials that he felt jeopardized the F.B.I.’s independence. At the time, Mr. Comey was overseeing the investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.
I did not know this particular fact, but it doesn't surprise me at all. The principal source for the rest of this story is, well, me—specifically a long interview I gave to reporter Michael Schmidt on Friday about my conversations with FBI Director James Comey over the last few months, and particularly about one such conversation that took place on March 27 over lunch in Comey’s FBI office.
This story breaks hard on the heels of this week’s revelation—also by the Times—that Trump had asked Comey to bury the investigation of Gen. Michael Flynn. A few words of elaboration are in order.
I called Schmidt Friday morning after reading his earlier story, which ran the previous evening, about Comey’s dinner with President Trump and the President’s demands at that dinner for a vow of loyalty. Schmidt had reported that Trump requested that Comey commit to personal loyalty to the President, and that Comey declined, telling the President that he would always have Comey’s “honesty.” When I read Schmidt’s account, I immediately understood certain things Comey had said to me over the previous few months in a different, and frankly more menacing, light. While I am not in the habit of discussing with reporters my confidential communications with friends, I decided that the things Comey had told me needed to be made public.
As I told Schmidt, I did not act in any sense at Comey’s request. The information I provided, however, dovetails neatly with the Times's subsequent discovery of the personal confrontation described above between Comey and the President over investigative inquiries and inquiries directly to the Bureau from the White House.
I did this interview on the record because the President that morning was already issuing threatening tweets suggesting that Comey was leaking things, and I didn’t want any room for misunderstanding that any kind of leak had taken place with respect to the information I was providing. There was no leak from Comey, no leak from anyone else at the FBI, and no leak from anyone outside of the bureau either—just conversations between friends, the contents of which one friend is now disclosing. For the same reason, I insisted that Schmidt record the conversation and give me a copy of the recording, so that we had a good record of what was said: both what was said by Comey as reported by me, and what was said by me about the conversation. Schmidt and I have had a few clarifying phone calls since then that were not recorded.
Before I go on, let me pause briefly to explain my relationship with Comey, which has been the subject of a lot of misinformation since I disclosed that we are friends in a piece in his defense a few months back. Ever since then, and particularly since Gizmodo used me as forensic evidence in its weird effort to out a supposed Comey Twitter account, people have developed this idea that Comey and I are especially close. Some people have even started following me on Twitter because they think I’m channeling Comey or am some secret line into his thinking. The truth is rather more pedestrian: We’re friends. We communicate regularly, but I am not among his close intimates or advisers. I know nothing about the Russia investigation that isn’t public. Comey has never talked to me about a live investigative matter—and I’ve never asked him to.
That said, sometimes, as friends do, we have lunch, and when we do so, we talk about things of mutual interest, like how Lawfare is going or how life running the FBI is going. And those latter conversations necessarily involve President Trump—and President Obama before him.
Note that in the conversations I’m going to describe here, I was not interviewing Comey. There are any number of follow-up questions I would ask were I meeting him in a journalistic capacity that I did not ask. So in the conversations I’m about to relate, the answers to all questions about whether I followed up on this or that point is that I did not. I never expected to be giving a public account of his thinking during this period. I took no notes. What follows is just my recollection of things he told about his interactions with Trump that I now believe flesh out the relationship between the two men in the weeks after that dinner about which the New York Times reported and in the period in which Trump also apparently asked Comey to back off of Flynn—and in which I now learn that Comey also told the President to stop asking the FBI about investigative matters.
The first point is a general one: Comey was preoccupied throughout this period with the need to protect the FBI from these inquiries on investigative matters from the White House. Two incidents involving such inquiries have become public: the Flynn discussion and Reince Priebus’s query to Andrew McCabe about whether the then-Deputy FBI Director could publicly dispute the New York Times’ reporting regarding communications between Trump associates and Russian officials. Whether there were other such incidents I do not know, but I suspect there were. What I do know is that Comey spent a great deal of energy doing what he alternately described as “training” the White House that officials had to go through the Justice Department and “reestablishing” normal hands-off White House-Bureau relations.
Comey never said specifically that this policing was about the Russia matter, but I certainly assumed that it was—probably alongside other things. While I do not know how many incidents we’re talking about, how severe they were, or their particular character, I do know this: Comey understood Trump’s people as having neither knowledge of nor respect for the independence of the law enforcement function. And he saw it as an ongoing task on his part to protect the rest of the Bureau from improper contacts and interferences from a group of people he did not regard as honorable. This was a general preoccupation of Comey’s in the months he and Trump overlapped—and the difference between this relationship and his regard for Obama (which was deep) was profound and palpable.
Second, Comey described at least two incidents which he regarded as efforts on the part of the President personally to compromise him or implicate him with either shows of closeness or actual chumminess with the President.
(continued in next post)
