Trump pledges to move quickly to nominate new FBI chief

Three other people are expected to interview on Saturday afternoon. Luttig clashed with the George W. Bush White House on a prominent terror case, rebuking the administration for its actions in the case involving “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla. Trump did not mention Comey during his speech at Liberty University. Trump said in a string of Twitter posts on Friday.

After that, the president said he had already chose to fire Comey and that he was going to do it regardless of whether or not Rosenstein recommended it. She also was deputy special counsel to the Senate special committee that investigated former US President Bill Clinton’s Whitewater scandal.

He also took the opportunity to repeat his many calls for a special prosecutor to lead the Trump-Russia probe, saying the Democratic Party would not support Trump’s new Federal Bureau of Investigation director if his administration turns down the request. He leans heavily on daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as Hope Hicks, his trusted campaign spokeswoman and Keith Schiller, his longtime bodyguard.

Paul Abbate: He now serves as the executive assistant director for the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch. “There’s no time to do it”, Trump said.

Some others who have interacted with Mr. Trump and spent time with him in his office said they didn’t witness him record any conversations. Still, Mr Priebus was among the tight circle of staff Mr Trump consulted about Mr Comey’s firing.

Even when aides moved ahead on an executive order creating a voter fraud commission – a presidential pet project that some advisers thought they had successfully shelved – Mr Trump signed the directive in private.

“I think Jim Comey deserves his chance to lay out to the American public his side of the facts”, Warner told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview on “This Week” on Sunday morning. That’s according to two people familiar with the search process who weren’t authorised to publicly discuss the deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity. This has been a major call among Democratic lawmakers in Washington, and a demand Republican congressional leaders have been quick to push against. The threat to him should be seen in that light. The criticism prompted Mr. Trump to threaten to end the traditional daily White House press briefings.

The news media criticized the White House for the evolving description of the decision-making process that preceded Mr. Trump’s decision to fire Mr. Comey.

A fourth person said he knew that Mr. Trump had recorded a phone conversation with him because it was later entered into evidence in a lawsuit. On Tuesday, the White House’s official explanation was that Trump had acted based on the recommendation of deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and attorney general Jeff Sessions. “I mean what they want to do is obstruct and delay, and I’m actually very surprised with Chuck Schumer because I know him; I’ve known him for a long time”.

That was just over a week ago, and though the path ahead in the Senate for the bill looked hard, administration officials and supporters could truthfully say, after several false starts, that they were moving forward on their legislative agenda. “He’s a little bit like a quarterback that gets ahead of his offensive line”.

“You now have a news media that’s totally out of control and thinks it’s more important than the President of the United States, it’s more important than the Constitution, it’s more important than the rule of law …”

When asked in a Fox News interview Friday whether there might be tape recordings of Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump said, “That I can’t talk about”.

But the blowback from Comey’s firing left the White House reeling once again.

The next day, Vice President Pence told reporters that Rosenstein had independently reviewed and recommended that Comey be fired.