Fired FBI chief Comey testifies on Trump pressure

YemenExtra

Former FBI director James Comey has testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, confirming that he leaked a meeting with Trump to the media and stating that some news stories about Russia are “just dead wrong.”

James Comey said in speaking before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a packed hearing room on Capitol Hill ” “I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the president was an effort to obstruct.”

“I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning. But that’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work towards to find out the intention and whether that’s an offense,” he added, referring to the independent prosecutor placed in charge of the FBI’s Russia probe.

Trump fired Comey on May 9, faulting him for failing to find intelligence community leakers feeding information to the media.

Early in his remarks, Comey said that although understood when he was hired in 2013 that he “could be fired by the president for any reason or no reason at all,” the “shifting explanations” he was told after his termination “confused me and increasingly concerned me.”

He said that President Trump repeatedly told him that he had “talked to lots of people” about him, and that he had learned Comey was doing a “great job.”

“So it confused me when I saw on TV that the president fired me because of the Russian investigation,” he said.

He accused the Trump administration of choosing to “defame me and, more importantly, the FBI,” by saying they had lost confidence in him.

meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, has called for former FBI Director James Comey to be investigated after Comey testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee about his abrupt firing by Trump.