Three Republican House committee chairmen said Thursday the leaked memos of James Comey proved the fired FBI director "never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened" by President Donald Trump.
The chairmen were California Rep. Devin Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee, Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte of the Judiciary Committee, and South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy of the House Oversight Committee.
They released a statement after news organizations disclosed the contents of the memos Comey provided to the Justice Department.
President Trump fired Comey in May 2017, leading to the appointment of Russia special counsel Robert Mueller by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
The 15 pages of leaked documents contained new details about Comey's interactions with Trump that he found so unnerving that Comey documented them in writing.
In their statement, the committee chairmen said Comey's documents were "significant for both what is in them and what is not."
The memos showed "the president made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated," they said.
"The memos also made clear the 'cloud' President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier."
The dossier was written by former British agent Christopher Steele and paid for in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Nunes, Goodlatte, and Gowdy noted that while Comey's memos provided many other details — and "myriad other extraneous facts" — about his encounters with Trump, "he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation."
The chairmen also called out Comey for what they said were "at least two different standards in his interactions with others."
"He chose not to memorialize conversations" with former President Barack Obama and other administration Democrats, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as his No. 2, Andrew McCabe, who was fired last month over a news leak about the FBI's Clinton email probe.
"But he immediately began to memorialize conversations with President Trump," the chairmen said.
"It is significant former Director Comey made no effort to memorialize conversations" with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, even though he recommended Clinton not be charged on her email use — and not Lynch herself.
A week after Comey announced he would not recommend charges against Clinton in July 2016, Lynch accepted Comey's decision and closed the inquiry.
Further, Comey's memos indicated he was "willing to work for someone he deemed morally unsuited for office, capable of lying, requiring of personal loyalty, worthy of impeachment, and sharing the traits of a mob boss."
Comey has described President Trump as such in interviews for his new book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership."
"Comey was willing to overlook all of the aforementioned characteristics in order to keep his job," the chairmen said.
Goodlatte, Gowdy, and Nunes also argued the memos showed Comey "was blind to biases within the FBI and had terrible judgment" regarding McCabe.
They concluded: "Rather than making a criminal case for obstruction or interference with an ongoing investigation, these memos would be defense exhibit A should such a charge be made."
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