President Donald Trump faced fallout Wednesday over revelations that he personally appealed to now-fired FBI Director James Comey to abandon the bureau’s investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, allegations based on notes Comey wrote after the meeting.
The White House has denied the report, which came amid a furor over the President’s discussions with Russian diplomats in which Trump is said to have disclosed classified information.
The White House has played down the importance and secrecy of the information Trump gave to the Russians, which had been supplied by Israel under an Intelligence-sharing agreement. Trump himself said he had “an absolute right” as President to share “facts pertaining to terrorism” and airline safety with Russia. Yet US allies and some members of Congress expressed concern bordering on alarm.
Trump left the White House Wednesday morning to head to Connecticut where he was scheduled to give the commencement address at the US Coast Guard Academy.
As for Comey, whom Trump fired last week, the FBI director wrote in a memo after a February meeting at the White House that the new President had asked him to shut down the FBI’s investigation of Flynn and his Russian contacts, said a person who had read the memo. The Flynn investigation was part of a broader probe into Russian interference in last year’s presidential election.
Comey’s memo, an apparent effort to create a paper trail of his contacts with the White House, would be the clearest evidence to date that the president has tried to influence the investigation.
The panel’s top Democrat, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, a constant Trump critic, called the allegation of Trump pressure on Comey “explosive” and said “it appears like a textbook case of criminal obstruction of justice.” John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said late Tuesday that the developments had reached “Watergate size and scale.”
Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, said simply, “It would be helpful to have less drama emanating from the White House.” The person who described the Comey memo to the AP was not authorised to discuss it by name and spoke on condition of anonymity. The existence of the memo was first reported Tuesday by The New York Times.
Trump fired Flynn on February 13, on grounds that he had misled Vice-President Mike Pence and other officials about his contacts with Russians. The intensifying drama comes as Trump is set to embark on Friday on his first foreign trip, which had been optimistically viewed by some aides as an opportunity to reset an administration.