President Trump went after James Comey in a pair of tweets this morning, trying to claim the former FBI Director lied to congress in his closed-door testimony on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Surprising few, the President’s tweets do not seem to align with Comey’s actual testimony.
Comey’s testimony was publicly released just hours after he testified, a condition pushed by Comey before he agreed to testify.
In his testimony, Comey told investigators that the investigation began with the examination of four Americans. Those four have not been named due to the ongoing investigation, but Comey did say that President Trump was not one of those four.
“I was briefed sometime at the end of July that the FBI had opened counterintelligence investigations of four individuals to see if there was a connection between those — any of those four and the Russian effort, and those four Americans did not include the candidate,” Comey said in his testimony.
Trump has long criticized Comey over his involvement in FBI investigations into Russian Interference, and fired Comey in May 2017. That termination led to Robert Mueller’s appointment.
Trump, of course, has long tried to pen the investigation as a “witch hunt,” including as recently as Saturday.
Comey will be appearing a second time, on the 17th of December, to answer further questions — which Comey himself Tweeted about, claiming that wasn’t a “search for the truth.”
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license