Former President Barack Obama’s White House ethics lawyer says former FBI Director James Comey’s account of his past meetings with President Trump sounds “like trial testimony.”
“Clearly Director Comey is looking ahead to the day, beyond the hearing tomorrow, where he may have to testify about this,” Norm Eisen said Wednesday on CNN.
“Whether it’s in an obstruction proceeding, in an impeachment proceeding, or something else,” he added. “And it’s like trial testimony with the detail. It has the ring of truth.”
{mosads}Eisen added that Comey’s account of his conversation with Trump about former national security adviser Michael Flynn leaves America “heading into very, very choppy waters.”
“And that Flynn conversation, it is another nail in Trump’s coffin,” he said before referencing former President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
“I think that this now with the additional detail in the Comey memo, this moves us into the same realm as Nixon’s obstruction, maybe worse. This is the equivalent of the Nixon tapes.”
Comey’s opening statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee was publicly released Wednesday, ahead of his highly-anticipated testimony before the panel Thursday.
The former FBI director’s testimony confirms reports that Trump asked him to “let go” of the investigation into Flynn.
Comey also recounts in the statement that Trump once asked him to “lift the cloud” of the FBI’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race.
Trump fired Comey last month amid the FBI’s investigation of Russian election interference last year, including possible ties between the president’s election campaign and Moscow.