“And then when the president gets on he just wants to chitchat.”
Mr. Wittes said that Mr. Comey told him that he perceived the call as Mr. Trump still “trying to get him on the team
and he saw it in light of his refusal to give him his loyalty.”
“Trump was still trying to get him on board,” Mr. Wittes said.
Mr. Wittes said that Mr. Comey said that he received a call from the White House and was told that “the president needs to talk to you urgently.”
A special counsel does not ensure that the F. B.I.
In the letter Mr. Trump sent to Mr. Comey last week in which he informed him
that he had been fired, Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.”
The F. B.I.’s longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, had close relationships with several presidents.
Their conversation took place after Mr. Comey’s phone call with the president, Mr. Wittes said, and Mr. Comey told him
that his relationship with the president and the White House staff was now in the right place.
Mr. Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the editor in chief of the Lawfare blog
and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, recalls a lunch he had with Mr. Comey in March at which Mr. Comey told him he had spent the first two months of Mr. Trump’s administration trying to preserve distance between the F. B.I.