Comey declines to testify before Senate Intelligence Committee

Former FBI Director James Comey has declined an invitation to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee next week, an aide to the committee’s chairman, GOP Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, said on Friday.

The committee had hoped to hear from Comey in a closed session following his abrupt firing on Tuesday by President Donald Trump.

The Intelligence Committee is in the midst of a broad investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and ties with Trump’s campaign.

But Burr said he expects Comey will soon speak privately with members of the committee.

Burr said in Raleigh, North Carolina, that the committee’s staff would likely “work something out in the not-too-distant future” for a meeting with Comey.

Earlier Friday, Trump issued an apparent warning to James Comey, tweeting that he had better hope there are no “tapes” of their conversations. Trump’s tweet came the morning after he asserted Comey had told him three times that he wasn’t under FBI investigation.

“I said, ‘If it’s possible, would you let me know, am I under investigation?’ He said you are not under investigation,” Trump said in an interview Thursday with NBC News. He said the discussions happened in two phone calls and at a dinner in which Comey was asking to keep his job.

Comey has not confirmed Trump’s account. Late Thursday, The New York Times cited two unnamed Comey associates who recounted his version of a January dinner with the president in which Trump asked for a pledge of loyalty. Comey declined, instead offering “honest.” When Trump then pressed for “honest loyalty,” Comey told him, “You will have that,” the associates said.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders disputed the report and said the president would “never even suggest the expectation of personal loyalty.”

Officials did not immediately respond to questions about whether Trump recorded his discussions with the FBI director.

Even before Trump’s provocative tweet, the White House was scrambling to clarify why Comey was fired. Trump told NBC he had planned to fire Comey all along, regardless of whether top Justice Department officials recommended the stunning step.

The White House initially cited a Justice Department memo criticizing Comey’s handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails as the impetus for Trump’s decision. But Trump on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the Russia investigation — which he dismissed as a “made-up story” — was also on his mind as he ousted the man overseeing the probe.

The shifting accounts of the decision to fire Comey, whom Trump derided as a “showboat” and “grandstander,” added to a mounting sense of uncertainty and chaos in the West Wing, as aides scrambled to get their stories straight and appease an angry president. Not even Vice President Mike Pence was spared the embarrassment of having told a version of events that was later discredited by Trump.