Saturday in Boone, IA, Republican Senator Joni Ernst commented on the possibility. Whatever Comey tells Congress isn't going to get Trump in legal trouble, so the White House has seemingly (and wisely) concluded that it's just better to get past it quickly. And yet, we hear of all these memos to the file, all of these dinners and meetings between President Trump and the F.B.I. - the former F.B.I. director.
"I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go", Comey quoted Trump as telling him that day.
"I do not. I think the travel ban is too broad", she said.
Both the Senate and the House of Representatives also have committees conducting their own probes into possible ties between Russian Federation and the Trump campaign.
Trump talked about his conversations with Comey in TV interviews and on Twitter, making it hard for him to claim that they should be kept confidential now, Rozell said.
The senators will likely hone in on discussions between Comey and President Donald Trump about the Russian Federation investigation, and whether the president improperly sought Comey's loyalty.
Senators will nearly certainly ask Comey whether Trump asked him to drop an Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into Flynn's contacts with Russian government officials.
President Trump is not expected to invoke executive privilege in an attempt to block FBI Director James Comey from testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee next week.
Trump invited to testify about interactions with Comey
Trump stopped short of saying that Comey lied under oath at the hearing , which occurred a month after Trump fired him on May 9. Trump said he never asked Comey for a pledge of loyalty and never told Comey he hoped the investigation of Flynn would go away.
Donald Trump and James Comey.
Trump likely would argue that Comey's testimony involves confidential conversations or matters of national security.
The White House has also denied that the President asked Comey for a pledge of loyalty shortly after he took office. Comey reportedly detailed that request, as well as other interactions with the president, in a series of memos.
While acknowledging no "smoking gun at this point", Warner said he wants "to know what kind of pressure, appropriate, inappropriate, how many conversations he had with the president about this topic".
Comey's testimony probably will focus on the private meetings the former Federal Bureau of Investigation director had with Trump and subsequently chronicled in internal memos and recounted to associates who have divulged their contents to The Associated Press and other media outlets.
Specifically, according to sources familiar with the matter, at no point in the weeks and months before Comey's termination did Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein or Attorney General Sessions tell Comey they were uneasy about his leadership or upset over what Rosenstein later called Comey's "mistaken" decision to announce the results of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server past year.
Are there any limits to what Comey can say?
Russia has repeatedly denied any effort to interfere in the US election, but Putin said on Thursday some Russians might have acted on their own without their government's involvement. The White House has denied that a "conversation of that nature occurred". Indeed, if Comey wishes to maintain any semblance of the reputation for integrity he so scrupulously cultivated before he blew up the presidential election, he will decline to reveal things that would compromise special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into contacts between Trump campaign aides and Russian Federation.
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