A Republican senator is taking President Donald Trump to task for not clearing up a burning question: whether he has tape recordings of his conversations with his then-FBI Director James Comey.
Trump first alluded to the so-called "tapes" in a May 12 tweet, following Comey's claim of written memos on his personal meetings with the president. "Frankly, James Comey confirmed a lot of what I said, and some of the things he said just weren't true". He painted Trump as a chief executive dismissive of the FBI's independence and made clear that he interpreted Trump's request to end an investigation into Flynn, his former national security adviser, as an order coming from the president. Trump Jr.'s Twitter barrage was all the more striking when compared to his father's silence, which the president broke with a Friday morning tweet accusing Comey of lying under oath.
As to the first three questions, all we know is that 17 intelligence agencies agree that Russian Federation tampered in our election, and that the FBI is investigating possible collusion by Trump and/or his campaign.
"I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting", Comey said, "It led me to believe that I gotta write it down, and I gotta write it down in a detailed way". While Trump's staunchest supporters have tried to paint Comey's testimony as vindication for the president, few Republicans who don't work for Trump stepped in to defend the president's version of his contacts with Comey. Sen. "And there'd be nothing wrong if I did say that, according to everybody that I've read today".
Preet Bharara (buh-RAH'-ruh) tells ABC's "This Week" that he thinks Trump was trying to "cultivate some kind of relationship" with him. "When you have the FBI director telling you three times you're not the subject of an investigation and you ask him, "would you please announce that publicly" and he refuses, I can understand why the president would be frustrated by that".
Incidents targeting Muslims drove rise in hate crimes in 2015: StatsCan
The number of hate crimes in Montréal was attributable to 33 more reported incidents targeting a religion. Jews remained the most targeted religious group with 178 incidents across Canada, down from 213.
TRUMP: Well, I didn't say that.
"I don't know whether it will happen - don't know whether it's going to be public", Sen. When Sessions lingered, Trump asked him to leave.
President Donald Trump listens during a news conference with Romania's President Klaus Werner Iohannis in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Friday, June 9, 2017. Yet the FBI investigation started last July, and nearly a year into it, we have no actual evidence of collusion. He further denied ever asking Comey for his "loyalty", contradicting Comey's detailed allegations in his sworn testimony.
The brief news conference - where each President will take two questions from the press - comes the day after James Comey's bombshell Capitol Hill testimony in which the fired Federal Bureau of Investigation director accused the White House of "lies". Trump then acknowledged to NBC's Lester Holt that he chose to fire Comey before receiving the memo, citing the FBI's Russian Federation investigation. As FBI director in the 2000s, Mueller worked with Comey, then the deputy U.S. attorney general. The Boston Globe observes: "The two men have had similar careers". At the same time, the head of the panel said its investigation is just getting started, and a second committee may summon Comey to testify. He didn't know of his own knowledge why the president fired him, but he knew from the president's own words that it was because of the Russian Federation investigation.
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