Former FBI Director James Comey wrote an op-ed on Tuesday denying the FBI ever spied on President Trump’s campaign in 2016 and claiming it was “just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances.”
His defense is coming as Attorney General William Barr is reviewing the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign and ahead of a Justice Department inspector general report that is expected to be concluded next month into whether there was FBI bias in its investigation.
Barr has said he has found answers to his questions to be “inadequate,” leaving him with more questions. He has also said the answers do not “hang together.” He has appointed the U.S. Attorney of Connecticut John Durham, a prosecutor experienced with government corruption, to lead the investigation into the FBI.
In his op-ed, Comey called Trump a “liar” who is harming “vital institutions.”
“We must call out his lies that the FBI was corrupt and committed treason, that we spied on the Trump campaign, and tried to defeat Donald Trump. We must constantly return to the stubborn facts,” he wrote.
He claimed that the investigation was warranted after the FBI saw the first Russian attack on the Democratic National Committee’s servers starting in mid-June 2006, and an allied ambassador in late July told the FBI that months earlier, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos “knew about the Russian effort” to release dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of emails as early as April 2016.
Comey did not mention in his op-ed that the “allied ambassador” — Australian diplomat Alexander Downer — has since said in interviews that Papadopoulos never mentioned “emails” to him and has also said there was no suggestion of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Specifically, Downer told Sky News there was “no suggestion that there was collusion between Donald Trump or Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians.”
