President Donald J. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday afternoon. The termination was recommended to President Trump by both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“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,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters.
“The FBI is one of our Nation’s most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement,” President Trump said in a statement.
The firing came a week after Comey provided inaccurate testimony regarding Hillary Clinton’s top deputy Huma Abedin. Comey erroneously testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Abedin made “a regular practice” of forwarding “hundreds and thousands” of Clinton messages to her husband, “some of which contain classified information.” Abedin’s husband is Anthony Weiner, a former disgraced Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives, who carried out a sexting relationship with an underage girl for months and had his laptop seized by the FBI to search for evidence.
FBI officials “privately acknowledged that Comey misstated what Abedin did and what the FBI investigators found,” Business Insider reported.
The termination also comes when the FBI is currently conducting an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the presidential election. This is one of the factors that Clinton blames for her not winning the election.
“I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off — and the evidence for that intervening event is, I think, compelling [and] persuasive,” Clinton said.
Comey was appointed as FBI director by former President Barack Obama in 2013.
The White House statement said a search for a replacement “will begin immediately.”
President Donald Trump's letter to FBI Director James Comey by CNBC.com on Scribd
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[USAToday]