Comey: Claim Hillary Clinton plotted Russia scandal ‘doesn’t ring a bell’
Former FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday said he doesn’t recall hearing that Hillary Clinton conjured a campaign to smear President Trump as a Russian colluder.
Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee he was unaware of Clinton’s alleged role stirring up false allegations against Trump, saying he doesn’t remember a Sept. 7, 2016, referral to him from the intelligence community.
“I do not” remember the referral, Comey told the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), during the hearing.
“That doesn’t ring a bell with me,” Comey confirmed when Graham read aloud from a document released Tuesday by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.
The spy chief’s disclosure was just a single written page, but Comey said, “I don’t understand Mr. Ratcliffe’s letter well enough to comment. It’s confusing. It contains within it a statement, I think, that it’s unverified information. I really don’t know what he’s doing.”
Ratcliffe said the claim against Clinton was unproven and could be an “exaggeration or fabrication,” but that it was serious enough that then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Barack Obama.
According to the intelligence director, handwritten notes from Brennan describe the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
The intelligence community sent Comey “an investigative referral” two months before the 2016 election outlining the claim, Ratcliffe said.
Comey repeatedly clashed with Republican senators at the hearing and defended his work on the Russia investigation, which ultimately found no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.
“There was no spying on the president,” he told Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).
In another series of exchanges, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) accused Comey of enjoying public attention and scolded him for a 2016 press conference, in the heat of the campaign against Trump, announcing Clinton would not face charges despite being “extremely careless” with a private e-mail server.
“You have been an equal opportunity egotist. You have tried to screw both Trump and Clinton,” Kennedy told Comey.
Comey was fired by the president in 2017 after presiding over the FBI’s early investigation of possible Trump campaign links to Russia, including the controversial use of a disputed and partially discredited dossier financed by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee to secure surveillance warrants against Trump adviser Carter Page.