Ryan on Trump’s meetings with Comey: ‘He’s just new to this’

The outcome could have significant repercussions for Mr Trump’s presidency as special counsel Robert Mueller and several congressional committees investigate alleged Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election and whether Mr Trump’s campaign colluded with this.

In what may wind up being the most underrated noteworthy detail of the Comey hearing, the former Federal Bureau of Investigation director said an.interesting thing about current Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Thursday afternoon, Marc Kasowitz stepped in to defend the president live on television.

Discussing the Oval Office meeting where Comey says Trump asked him to back off Flynn, Feinstein asked: “Why didn’t you stop and say, ‘Mr”. And Kasowitz said Trump had never pressured Comey to drop the investigation against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

The lawyer also accused Comey of misstating the timing of the leak. At an event in South Brunswick Thursday, Christie clarified what he meant by “normal New York City conversations”.

Comey said that he declined to do so in large part because of the “duty to correct” that would be created if that situation changed. He also said he hoped that, if Trump taped their conversations, the president would release the recordings. Today, Mr. Comey admitted that he leaked to friends his purported memos of these privileged conversations, one of which he testified was classified. “So I asked a friend of mine to share the content of (my memos) with a reporter”.

Rubio opened his questioning at the January 11 confirmation hearing for Rex Tillerson, then Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, with blistering questions about whether the Exxon Mobil CEO believed that Russians, at the behest of President Vladimir Putin, had interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign. In January he appeared ready take Tillerson’s nomination down, particularly after Rubio asked if Putin was a “war criminal”.

Comey on Thursday called it “disturbing” that the president would raise the matter.

Whether Trump’s behavior and comment amount to obstruction of justice, however, depends not on how Comey understood the comment, but Trump’s intent in delivering it.

“Hoping and telling are two very different things”, the younger Trump tweeted. Angus King of ME that he had to break a date with his wife when Trump called him for a dinner at the White House.

Comey did not make any major new revelations about alleged links between Trump or his associates and Russian Federation, an issue that has dogged the president’s first months in office.

And, Mr Comey said, he doesn’t regret keeping the president’s conversations within a tight circle: “No action was the most important thing I could do to make sure there was no interference in the investigation”. One was about the dossier produced by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele who had claimed that the Kremlin held sexual and financial secrets about Mr Trump.

“The reason I keep saying his words is I took it as a direction”, he said. “And I don’t think it’s something intentional”.

During the Senate intelligence committee hearing, Sen. “We’re under siege … but we will come out bigger and better and stronger than ever”, he said.”We know how to fight and we will never give up”, the president added.

But to House Speaker Paul Ryan, Trump’s handling of the meeting showed that he wasn’t steeped in the protocols of how a president interacts with law enforcement. “The president is new at this”. He’s new to government. Yet it is differences of opinion among Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, that are standing in the way of what Trump wants to do on health care and other issues. At the time, Flynn was under investigation for his ties to Russian Federation. I paraphrase, because the transcript is not yet available: the president can, in theory, decide who to investigate, who to stop investigating, who to prosecute and who not to prosecute.

So, as Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California, put it to Comey: Why didn’t he simply say, “Mr. President, this is wrong”? The memo described Comey’s Oval Office meeting with the president on February 14, not his private dinner with the president on January 27.