Comey memos

James Comey, the 7th director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was dismissed by U.S. President Donald Trump on May 9, 2017. Comey had been under public and political pressure as a result of both the FBI's role in the Hillary Clinton email controversy and the FBI's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, which also involves a possible collusion with the 2016 Donald Trump campaign.

Trump dismissed Comey by way of a termination letter in which he stated that he was acting on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. In the following days, he gave numerous explanations of the dismissal that contradicted his staff and also belied the initial impression that Sessions and Rosenstein had influenced his decision. Trump publicly stated that he had already decided to fire Comey; it later emerged that he had written his own early draft of the termination letter, and had solicited the Rosenstein memo the day before citing it. He also stated that dismissing Comey would relieve unnecessary pressure on the ability to engage and negotiate with Russia, due to "grandstanding and politicizing" the investigation. He called the investigation a "witch hunt". Trump was reportedly "enormously frustrated" that Comey would not publicly confirm that the president was not personally under investigation.

Shortly after his termination, Comey asked a friend to leak excerpts to the press of a memo he had written while FBI Director, recounting a private conversation with Trump in February 2017. According to Comey, Trump had asked him to "let go" of potential charges against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn whom Trump had fired the day before. In light of the dismissal, the memo, and Comey's testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017, several media figures, political opponents and legal scholars said that Trump's acts could be construed as obstruction of justice, while others disagreed.

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