President Trump issued a fresh denial
Sunday that he asked then-FBI Director James B. Comey to halt an
investigation into the conduct of his dismissed national security
adviser Michael Flynn.
“I never asked Comey to stop
investigating Flynn,” Trump said in a pre-dawn message on Twitter. “Just
more Fake News covering another Comey lie!”
The tweet was the latest in a running commentary on the case from Trump
that began Saturday, a day after Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the
FBI about his interactions with a Russian official.
In other tweets Sunday, Trump also seized on news that
Peter Strzok
— the former top FBI official assigned to special counsel Robert S.
Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election — was
taken off that job this summer after his bosses discovered that he and
another member of Mueller’s team had exchanged politically charged texts
disparaging Trump and supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton. Strzok was
also a key player in the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private
email server, which ended without charges against her.
Trump fired Flynn 25 days into his administration for misrepresenting
the nature of his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian
ambassador in Washington at the time, to Vice President Pence and other
administration officials.
Comey has alleged that the day after
that, Trump urged him to be lenient with Flynn, producing notes in which
he quoted Trump as saying, “I hope you can let this go.”
Trump stoked the controversy with one of his Saturday tweets, in
which he said part of the rationale for firing Flynn was that he had
lied to the FBI.
“I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI,” Trump wrote in that tweet.
But
critics pounced Saturday on Trump, arguing that if he knew at the time
of his conversation with Comey that Flynn had lied to the FBI and was
under investigation, it may constitute an attempt to obstruct that
investigation.
http://www.eu-digest.blogspot.com
Note EU-Digest: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we practice to deceive.”
Read more: ‘I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn’: Trump goes on tweetstorm about the FBI - The Washington Post
