He had given Donald Trump nearly three weeks to walk back his incendiary tweets accusing President Obama of wire tapping Trump Tower during the campaign. If such surveillance had been done through legal channels, the FBI would have known; if done illegally, it was a scandal of historic proportions and the FBI should be digging into it. Either way, Trumps accusation implicated the integrity of Comeys bureau, which is why the former prosecutor felt compelled to push back as the cameras rolled. I have no information that supports those tweets, Comey said. We have looked carefully inside the FBI. The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same.
The statement was concise, direct and damning. The President of the United States had been marked as a fabulist by one of the top officials in government charged with finding the truth. And yet, for the man being called out, the rebuke was nothing of the sort.
Im a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right, Trump told TIME two days later, in a 20-minute phone interview from the Oval Office. The testimony, in other words, had not fazed him at all. He was still convinced he would be proved right. I have articles saying it happened.
That is not exactly true. The New York Times reported on Jan. 20 that wiretapped data had been used in an investigation of Trumps advisers, but not that Obama had targeted Trump for wiretapping, as Trump had claimed. But he had new ammunition: House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes had just announced that he had seen intelligence reports showing the President-elect and his team were at least monitored as part of legally collected information. Nunes suggested the monitoring was most likely the result of incidental collection, which occurs when a target of an intelligence operation, like a foreign ambassador, talks with another U.S. person. But Nunes never claimed that Obama wiretapped Trump.
And yet for Trump, who proceeded to read at length over the phone from a Politico article on Nunes statement, such distinctions did not matter. That means Im right, he said. He also argued that the punctuation in his original tweet meant he did not mean wiretapping in the literal sense. When I said wire tapping, it was in quotes, he said.
What did he mean? Trump argued that his claims about scandalous wiretaps by Obama had to be viewed within the context of other assertions he had made in the past, which had later come true. He had predicted, for instance, that the sexting of former Representative Anthony Weiner would become a problem for Hillary Clintons campaign, which it did, when the FBI found emails to Clinton on his computer. He had claimed that he would win the White House, when few believed him, which he did. He claimed that Britain would vote to exit the European UnionI took a lot of heat when I said Brexit was going to pass. He described Brussels as a hellhole before a major terrorist attack there. I happen to be a person that knows how life works, he said.
He also claimed credit for things he had said that were factually incorrect at the time, but for which he later found evidence. At a February rally, in a discussion about problems caused by new migrants in Europe, he said, Look at whats happening last night in Sweden. Nothing had happened the prior night in Sweden, prompting diplomatic protests from Stockholm. But days later, there was a riot in a predominantly immigrant suburb in response to a local arrest. Which, to the Presidents way of thinking, made him a truth-teller. I was right about that, he said.
Truth, in other words, takes time to ripen: he also said his unsubstantiated claim that at least 3 million undocumented immigrants had voted illegally in the 2016 election would be proved right eventually, though he hinted to TIME that he no longer stood by all parts of that claim. When I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong. In other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly, and/or illegally, the President said. Im forming a committee on it.
