call he said, it so he said it once at dinner and then he said it twice during phone calls. did you call him? in one case i called him and one case he called me. and did you ask am i under investigation? i asked him, yes. i said if it s possible, would you let me know am i under investigation, and he said you are not under investigation. reporter: comey describing an oval office meeting with mr. trump and other counterterrorism officials where all but comey were dismissed. i want to talk about michael flynn, comey quotes the president as saying, referring to his recently fired national security adviser. i hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting flynn go, comey says trump told him. he s a good guy. i hope you can let this go. comey goes on to say he prepared an unclassified memo of that conversation, understanding that the president was requesting he drop any probe into flynn. he shared that assessment with his fbi leadership team but declined to share i
to january where the three of us, plus carl bernstein broke a story about this dossier full of salacious and unverified accusations against president trump put together by a former mi-6 operative stating that the russians claimed to have damaging information on him, because that s how the comey narrative begins and that seems to be the place where president trump and jim comey first start to go in opposite directions. well, that s right. i mean, it was and we knew because we had reported this, that it had to be an uncomfortable conversation already because this is the first time have a private sort of pull aside at this broad briefing of president-elect then president-elect trump where the fbi director had to say to him, by the way, we have this dossier that alleges the russians believe they have compromising personal and financial information, some of which we know is salacious, uncomfortable, as it is, and we know now based on comey s testimony that that s one of the first conv
on friday january 27th at 6:30 p.m. in the green room at the white house. he had called me at lunchtime that day and invited me to dinner that night saying he was going to invite my whole family but decided to have just me this time. with the whole family coming the next time. it was unclear from the conversation who else would be at the dinner, although i assumed there would be others. it turned out to be just the two of us seated at a small table in the green room. two navy stewards waited on us. the president began by asking me whether i wanted to stay on as fbi director, which i found strange because he had already told me twice in earlier conversations that he hoped i would stay. and i had assured him that i intended to. he said that lots of people wanted my job and, given the abuse i had taken during the previous year, he would understand if i wanted to walk away. james comey goes on.
he paused and he said, that s what i want, honest loyalty. i paused and then said you will get that from me. as i wrote in the memo, i created immediately after the dinner, it is possible we understood the phrase honest loyalty differently. but i decided it wouldn t be productive to push it further. the term honest loyalty had helped end a very awkward conversation and my explanations had made it clear what he should expect. during the dinner, the president returned to the salacious material i had briefed him on january 6th and he strongly denied the allegations. in closing in this section, he said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn t happen. i replied that he should give that careful thought because it might create a narrative that we re investigating him personally, which we weren t, and because it was very difficult to prove a negative. he said he would think about it and ask me to think about it.
the than t the president appears to have threatened comey s job while telling him i need loyalty. david gregory, there will be a lot of focus on him asking comey to stop the flynn investigation. that is part of what you will hear a lot of politicians call inappropriate today. the question is what does that mean in censure or legality or illeg illegality. warner says, that means do you want to save your job. is that a fair reckoning of the question? i think there is no question the president created this awkward pre-text to get together and comey describes it. he indicated he wanted to stay in his role and it was if they never had that conversation. here trump is setting up a dinner with the two of them alone where they isolated and trump making it clear. it is good. you want to stay in your job,