WASHINGTON _ In an explosive hearing, former FBI Director James B. Comey told Congress on Thursday he believed President Donald Trump fired him to impede the FBI's Russia investigation, and described the president's claims that the FBI was poorly led and in disarray as "lies, plain and simple."
"It's my judgment that I was fired because of the Russia investigation," Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee during a three-hour hearing broadcast live on every major TV network. "I was fired in some way to change _ or the endeavor was to change _ the way the Russia investigation was being conducted."
Comey also said he decided to write memos for the FBI after his private meetings and phone calls with Trump because he didn't trust the president to tell the truth.
"I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meetings," said Comey, a registered Republican most of his life who previously served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Comey's charges provided riveting political drama but no new bombshells about Russian meddling in the 2016 election or improper contacts by the Trump campaign or the White House with Russian authorities. It concluded with the certainty that what Trump has called the "cloud" of criminal and congressional investigations will not lift anytime soon.
The White House angrily denied Trump was a liar, but left it to Trump's personal lawyer from New York to say Comey's testimony vindicated the president. Trump "never, in form or substance, directed or suggested" that Comey block an FBI investigation, the lawyer said.
Comey held center stage as a veteran lawman with a sober, just-the-facts mien, taking careful aim at a president who he said had defamed him and impugned the FBI.
At times he mixed an aw-shucks style with a subtle knife twist. He noted that after he was fired May 9, Trump had tweeted that Comey "better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"
"Lordy, I hope there are tapes," Comey said Thursday, saying recordings would confirm his account. But he suggested that Trump's implied threat had backfired spectacularly.
Comey said he "woke up in the middle of the night" a few days later "because it didn't dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape."
He said he decided to send copies of his memos about his talks with the president to a friend, a professor at Columbia Law School later identified as Daniel C. Richman, with instructions to give them to a New York Times reporter.
"I asked my friend, 'Make sure this gets out,'" he said. "I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel."
The strategy paid off when the Justice Department appointed former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III as a special prosecutor for the overlapping counterintelligence and criminal investigations, a move meant to limit the possibility of White House interference.
Comey said he gave his copies of the memos to Mueller, but said Richman might still have them too. Comey said he would be happy to have the memos released _ along with any Oval Office tapes, if they exist.
Richman declined to comment Thursday. The White House said it had no comment on whether tapes exist.
Comey said Trump sought repeatedly to get him to publicly declare that the president was not under investigation. Comey said he had declined to do so because he would be duty-bound to declare otherwise if the focus of the investigation shifted to Trump.
He said he first told the president he wasn't under investigation because he worried that Trump would believe the FBI was out to get him _ what Comey called "kind of a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation." Hoover collected intelligence for political blackmail during his nearly five decades as FBI director.
Comey also complained that he thought Trump sought a "patronage relationship" in which the FBI director was beholden to the president, a status he said was highly inappropriate.
"The statue of Justice has a blindfold on because you're not supposed to be peeking out to see if your patron is pleased or not with what you're doing," he said.
None of the Republicans on the committee challenged Comey's detailed recollection of his conversations with Trump, although several pressed him to explain why he had not objected to Trump at the time or raised his concerns with Attorney General Jeff Sessions or members of Congress.
Several also seized on Comey's confirmation that he had told Trump he was not under investigation, noting that it was among the few facts that had not leaked over the last few months.
As many Americans sat glued to TV sets and digital screens, Trump met with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis and other senior aides, and watched parts of the hearing from the White House dining room, aides said. The president did not tweet once or mention Comey during a later speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference.
The White House refused to comment on the substance of Comey's testimony, although the deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, responded angrily when asked about his charge that the president had lied.
"No, I can definitively say the president is not a liar," she told reporters. "It's frankly insulting that that question would be asked."
After the hearing, Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, said Comey had "completely vindicated" the president, even as he blasted Comey for leaking memos of his private conversations.
Kasowitz denied key parts of Comey's account, insisting that Trump never asked Comey to back off the investigation of national security adviser Michael Flynn or asked Comey for a loyalty pledge.
"Mr. Comey has now finally confirmed publicly what he repeatedly told the president privately: The president was not under investigation as part of any probe into Russian interference," Kasowitz said.
He also blasted Comey for disclosing his conversations with Trump, calling them "privileged communications" that should not be made public.
In his testimony, Comey described a series of awkward and often tense conversations with Trump that he said were unique in his experience.
In perhaps the most important one, he recalled how Trump ordered Sessions, senior adviser Jared Kushner and others out of the Oval Office so he could address Comey in private on Feb. 14, a day after Flynn was forced to resign for lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
"I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go," Comey quoted Trump as saying.
Comey did not say whether he believed Trump sought to obstruct justice, as some Democrats have alleged, and he carefully avoided expressing an opinion as to whether the president broke the law.
But he said he understood Trump's statement was aimed at getting him to throttle back the Flynn investigation.
"I took it as a direction," Comey said. "I mean, this is the president of the United States, with me alone, saying, 'I hope' this. I took it as, this is what he wants me to do.
"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 try and understand what the intention was there, and whether that's an offense," Comey said.
As the panel parsed the conversation, Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, suggested that Trump's request could not be considered obstruction of justice because the president did not order him to do anything.
But Comey dipped into medieval history to explain why he understood Trump's "hope" as a directive.
"It rings in my ear as kind of, 'Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?'" he said, referring to King Henry II's declaration about Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury killed by the king's knights in 1170.
Comey conceded he could have warned Trump he was crossing an ethical and potentially legal line with his call to drop the Flynn investigation.
"Maybe if I were stronger, I would have," Comey replied. "I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took it in."
Comey disclosed publicly for the first time that investigators are looking into whether Flynn misled FBI agents when they interviewed him Jan. 24 about conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December.
Asked by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., whether Flynn had ever deceived FBI agents, Comey said he could not respond in detail because "that was the subject of the criminal inquiry."
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