WASHINGTON — Former FBI Director James Comey plans to testify Thursday that President Donald Trump repeatedly pressured him to publicly announce that he was not personally under federal investigation in connection with the Justice Department inquiry into Russian meddling in last year’s election.
Comey will say that he told Trump on at least one occasion in January that he was not under investigation at that time. Comey has said that investigators are looking into possible links between associates of Trump and the Russian election interference.
Trump, in a previously undisclosed phone call on March 30, also asked Comey what could be done to “lift the cloud” over Trump from the investigation, according to remarks written by Comey and published Wednesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee, before which he will appear. During the call, the president told Comey that the Russia investigation was hurting his ability to govern.
“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 said in the prepared testimony.
Comey wrote a series of memos documenting his interactions with the president, some of which have been described to The New York Times by people who have read them. In one, he told of Trump asking him to end the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
Comey will tell senators that he wrote his first memo shortly after he first met Trump on Jan. 6, during the presidential transition. In that meeting, Comey briefed the president-elect on the contents of a dossier of salacious allegations that a former British spy believed the Russian government had collected on Trump.
Comey said the last time he had spoken with Trump was April 11. Trump called to ask again when Comey planned to put out word that Trump was not under investigation. Comey responded that he had passed the request on to his bosses at the Justice Department but had not heard back.