Admin l Wednesday, June 07, 2017
WASHINGTON, United States – Former Director of FBI, Mr. James Comey has met with the Senate Committee on Intelligence, during which he revealed how President of the United States, Mr. Donald Trump beged him to back down on probing Flynn.
“He then said, ‘I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go. I replied only that ‘he is a good guy.’ (In fact, I had a positive experience dealing with Mike Flynn when he was a colleague as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the beginning of my term at FBI.) I did not say I would ‘let this go.'”, he said in a statement publish online by the Senate.
Comey said he spoke privately with Trump nine times — including three one-on-one meetings — and took detailed notes of his encounters in declassified memos.
In his written testimony, Comey described a March 30 phone call where he said that Trump stressed “the cloud” of the Russia investigations was “interfering with his ability to make deals for the country.
“I did not tell the President that the FBI and the Department of Justice had been reluctant to make public statements that we did not have an open case on President Trump for a number of reasons, most importantly because it would create a duty to correct, should that change,” Comey wrote in his testimony.
Comey said Trump told him, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty” during their first dinner in January. Comey said, “I didn’t move, speak or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. You will always get honesty from me.” He said and that the President responded, “that’s what I want. Honest loyalty.”
When Trump told Domey he was considering ordering him to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn’t happen,” Comey wrote. “I replied that he should give that careful thought because it might create a narrative that we were investigating him personally, which we weren’t, and because it was very difficult to prove a negative. He said he would think about it and asked me to think about it.”
