Tuesday had its own surprise: A
report from the New York Timesabout a conversation between Comey and the president in which Trump asked him to end the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. According to the Times, Comey detailed the Feb. 14 conversation with Trump in a memo that he shared with other senior FBI officials at the time — but didn’t reveal it publicly because he didn’t want to influence the investigation.
The White House denied it in a statement. It reads, in part: “The President has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn. The President has the utmost respect for our law enforcement agencies, and all investigations. This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the President and Mr. Comey.”
According to Comey’s purported memo, read to Times reporters by an associate, Trump said in their conversation, “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.”
It seems as though the flood of information over the past 10 days has been pushing us to a point that we haven’t yet reached, forcing an explicit choice between the word of the White House and the word of an outside party. The Post’s story about the revelation of classified information came close, but the carefully worded administration responses released Monday didn’t constitute a robust denial of our story. In this case, the denial of the Times report is explicit. Trump’s White House says the report about the Comey memo is not “truthful or accurate.”
Forcing the American public to decide: Whom do you believe, Trump or Comey? Or, in a layer of abstraction that will continue to complicate things, the White House or the reporting of the Times (and others, including
The Post)?
There is a surfeit of circumstantial evidence that bolsters the idea that Trump pressured Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn.
• After Yates’s testimony eight days ago, White House press secretary Sean Spicer was asked why Trump kept defending Flynn, despite his having been asked to resign for apparently lying to the vice president. Spicer
insisted that the president didn’t want to “smear” Flynn, who is a “good man.” (In Comey’s memo, he’s a “good guy.”)
• Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt that he was
thinking of the Russia investigation when he decided to fire Comey, contrary to what his staff had been insisting.
• His dinner with Comey, in which he admits to asking the FBI director whether he himself was under investigation, came the day after Yates informed the White House that Flynn’s actions conflicted with what Vice President Pence had said publicly — a conversation that revealed that the FBI was investigating Flynn.