President Donald Trump suggested Wednesday that former F.B.I. director __James Comey, whom he fired in May amid the bureau’s investigation into alleged collusion between his campaign and Russia, was trying to blackmail him when the two discussed the existence of the infamous Steele dossier. The unverified intelligence document, which was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, was first made public in January, though copies had circulated in political and media circles for months. It contains salacious allegations linking Trump to Russia, many of which were considered by most news outlets to be too absurd or unverifiable to be published. Still, the U.S. government took the document seriously enough that it was investigated by the F.B.I., which has since confirmed several of Steele’s allegations.

In early January, Trump was briefed on the dossier by the nation’s four top intelligence officials, who presented a summary of its findings to the president-elect in order to make him aware of the allegations about him and his campaign. But in a sprawling interview with The New York Times, published Wednesday night, Trump asserted that when Comey told him about the dossier, in a meeting at Trump Tower two weeks before the inauguration, he was attempting to hold it over his head. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Trump told the Times. When he was asked if he thought the dossier would be used as leverage, Trump said, “Yeah, I think so. In retrospect.”

In his interview, Trump said Comey was among those who had briefed him on Russian interference in the U.S. election. After the meeting, Trump says, Comey took him aside to tell him about the dossier, which Trump interpreted as a threat, and not the director of an intelligence agency doing his job. Trump again denied the dossier’s claims in his interview. “When he brought it to me, I said this is really, made-up junk. I didn’t think about any of it. I just thought about man, this is such a phony deal,” he said. According to Comey, Trump made much the same point when they spoke over the phone in March, just weeks before the president fired him. “He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia,” Comey wrote in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee last month. The former F.B.I. director also testified that he had tried to make it clear to Trump that sharing the information about the dossier wasn’t intended to be threatening. His reassurances apparently fell on deaf ears.