President Donald Trump sacks FBI Director James Comey
President Donald Trump has sacked the Director of the FBI James Comey.
The White House released a statement saying that Comey had been “terminated and removed from office”.
This comes after a recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“Today, President Donald J. Trump informed FBI Director James Comey that he has been terminated and removed from office,” a statement released on Tuesday read.
“President Trump acted based on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.”
The move comes after it was revealed in a fact check from ProPublica that Comey had exaggerated the number of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails which had been found on former Representative Anthony Wiener’s laptop.
Comey had told a congressional pannel that the number of emails found on the disgraced former Representative’s laptop had been “hundreds and thousands”, forwarded from Huma Abedin.
He said “some of [the emails] had contained classified information” sent from Abedin to Wiener, her estranged husband.
The ProPublica fact check stated that most of the emails were Blackberry backups, and that only a small number had been manually forwarded.
President Trump, in his letter dismissing Comey, noted that he had been told three times by the FBI Director that he was not under investigation for links to Russia.
“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau,” Trump wrote.
“Donald Trump just fired the man leading the investigation into his ties to Russia. He did so on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had promised to recuse himself from that probe after lying under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee,” said HRC President Chad Griffin of the news that Comey had been sacked.
“There is no time for delay in appointing a special prosecutor. Our democracy depends on it. We’ve been down a similar path before. Congress must put patriotism before party and do what’s right for the country.”
Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions declined to participate in an FBI investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The calls came as it was revealed that Sessions met the Russian envoy during the US election campaign.
