Trump threatens Comey over leaked account of White House dinner
By
Barry Grey
13 May 2017
The crisis engulfing the Trump administration was compounded Friday by the president’s early morning tweet threatening fired FBI Director James Comey over leaked accounts of a White House dinner that contradicted the story given out by the president in an interview the previous day with NBC News.
In the interview, broadcast two days after Trump fired Comey without warning, the president told Lester Holt that Comey had requested the January 27 meeting to persuade the president to keep him at his FBI post. According to Trump, during the one-on-one dinner, he asked Comey if he was a target of the FBI investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin government. Comey assured him he was not, Trump said, calling this one of three occasions on which the FBI head gave this assurance.
Late Thursday evening, the New York Times posted a story that cited two unnamed Comey associates who flatly rejected Trump’s account, saying the ex-FBI director had told them he had been summoned to the White House a week after Trump’s inauguration and only reluctantly agreed to the meeting, for fear of compromising the investigation he was overseeing. The associates denied that Comey told Trump he was not a target of the investigation, which would have been a clear violation of FBI and Justice Department protocol concerning ongoing investigations.
Instead, the Comey surrogates said, Trump asked twice for the FBI head to pledge his loyalty to the president, which Comey refused to do.
The White House quickly dismissed this account of the dinner as incorrect. But evidently in response to the Times article, Trump tweeted early…