Russell Berman, Jun 9, 2017<\/p>\n
\u201cOne hundred percent,\u201d the president replied when a reporter asked if he\u2019d be willing to contradict his fired FBI director under penalty of perjury.<\/p>\n
A defiant President Trump on Friday said he\u2019d be willing to testify under oath about his conversations with the FBI director he fired, James Comey.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne hundred percent,\u201d the president quickly replied at a Rose Garden press conference when Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked him whether he\u2019d be willing to contradict Comey under oath. Trump specifically disputed Comey\u2019s assertions before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the president demanded his loyalty and asked him to drop the FBI\u2019s investigation into Michael Flynn, his former national-security adviser.<\/p>\n
\u201cThink about it, I hardly know the man,\u201d Trump said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make sense. I didn\u2019t say that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like so many of this president\u2019s press conferences, Trump\u2019s first in-person response to Comey\u2019s dramatic testimony had a bizarre quality. The president again lashed out at the media and blamed Democrats for a hearing that was called by a Republican-led committee. He continued to dangle the possibility that he has \u201ctapes\u201d of his conversations at the White House by refusing repeated attempts by reporters to confirm or deny their existence. \u201cWell, I\u2019ll tell you about that sometime in the near future,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
If he doesn\u2019t want to tell the press about the possible tapes, he will soon have to tell Congress. Within an hour of the president\u2019s remarks, the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee announced they had written to the White House counsel, Don McGahn, asking \u201cthat he inform the committee whether any White House recordings or memoranda of Comey\u2019s conversations with President Trump now exist or have in the past.\u201d The lawmakers want copies of the tapes or memos, if they exist, by June 23. They also wrote to Comey asking for copies of the memos he wrote documenting his conversations with Trump, and in a separate request, the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote a letter to Columbia Professor Daniel Richman asking for copies of the memos Comey gave to him with instructions to leak to the press. Comey told senators on Thursday that he no longer had the memos but had provided them to Mueller.<\/p>\n
Even as he disputed Comey\u2019s most damaging allegations, Trump on Friday claimed vindication through others. \u201cNo collusion. No obstruction. He\u2019s a leaker, but we want to get back to running our great country,\u201d the president said. He added: \u201cWe were very, very happy. And frankly James Comey confirmed a lot of what I said and some of the things that he said just weren\u2019t true.\u201d<\/p>\n
The president and his allies have seized on Comey\u2019s confirmation that he told Trump on multiple occasions that he was not personally under investigation by the FBI as part of its probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible involvement by members of Trump\u2019s campaign. But it\u2019s not clear whether that assertion is still true, and Comey suggested that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, may be investigating whether Trump committed obstruction of justice when, according to Comey, he said he hoped that the then-FBI director could \u201csee a way clear\u201d to letting the Flynn investigation go. Comey testified that he took the request as a direction, one he refused to obey.<\/p>\n
Yet the most significant comment Trump made on Friday was his expressed willingness to testify under the penalty of perjury, either before Congress or in a deposition by Mueller. Because Comey was himself under oath at Thursday\u2019s hearing, the president was effectively accusing him of committing a federal crime by lying to Congress.<\/p>\n