During James Comey’s historic testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the former FBI director debunked part of a major New York Times report on the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to the Russian government.
When asked specifically about the February article by Sen. James Risch (R.-Idaho), “In the main, it was not true.”
“The challenge, and I’m not picking on reporters, about writing stories about classified information is the people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on and those of us who actually know what’s going on are not talking about it,” Comey added. “And we don’t call the press and say, ‘Hey, you got that thing wrong.’”
As The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple put the exchange in perspecitve: “The comments from Comey revive a rather heated media-politics brushfire from the very early days of the Trump administration.”
The original Times story alleged that phone records and intercepted calls provided evidence that Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials over the course of 2016 presidential campaign.
It’s important to note, however, that sources had told the newspaper that officials had found no evidence of actual collusion between said Trump intermediaries and Russian entities.
The White House vehemently denied the report at the time.
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