FBI Director James Comey has been relieved of his duties and dismissed from his position by President Donald Trump, according to White House press secretary Sean Spicer.
“The president has accepted the recommendation of the attorney general and the deputy attorney general regarding the dismissal of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Spicer told reporters in the briefing room, according to the Washington Post.
Comey’s dismissal comes on the heels of a letter being sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee early Tuesday by the FBI, indicating that Comey misstated key findings involving the Hillary Clinton email investigation during testimony last week.
The letter clarified that only a “small number” of emails had been forwarded to disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, not the “hundreds and thousands” that Comey had claimed in his testimony.
FBI Assistant Director Gregory A. Bower wrote, “This letter is intended to supplement that testimony to ensure that the committee has the full context of what was reviewed and found on the laptop.”
Comey was defending the FBI’s probe at last week’s hearing, and he appeared to offer new details about what happened last fall when FBI agents found thousands of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s emails on the computer of Weiner, her husband.
“Somehow, her emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information,” Comey said, adding later, “His then-spouse Huma Abedin appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him, I think, to print out for her so she could then deliver them to the secretary of state.”
Comey also said that Abedin “forwarded hundreds and thousands of emails, some of which contained classified information,” but people close to the investigation said that neither of those statements is true, according to the Post.
From the Post:
Comey’s incorrect comments about Abedin surfaced again this week at a different Senate hearing, when Cruz pressed former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. to say how he would handle an employee who “forwarded hundreds or even thousands of e-mails to a non-government individual, their spouse, on a non-government computer.’’
Clapper said such conduct “raises all kinds of potential security concerns.”
At the hearing last week, Comey spent hours defending his handling of the investigation of Clinton’s use of a private server for work while she was secretary of state, saying it made him “mildly nauseous” to think his decisions might have affected the outcome of the presidential election, but insisting that he had no regrets and would not have handled it differently.
Comey’s dismissal puts Trump in the position of choosing his successor, and ultimately the person who will be responsible for investigating the president.
And you thought this season of White House Apprentice was going to be boring.
Read more at the Washington Post.