Then-FBI director James Comey told President Donald Trump last January that former Attorney General Eric Holder was “smarter” than his successor, Loretta Lynch.
The comment was preserved in one of the memoranda that Comey wrote about his conversations with the president before he was fired — and whose contents he leaked, selectively, to the media via a New York University law professor who is now his attorney.
In a memorandum dated January 28, 2017, Comey recalls an extensive conversation with the president over dinner. When Trump asked him to compare Holder and Lynch, Comey notes, “I said I thought AG Holder was smarter and more sophisticated and smoother than AG Lynch, who I added is a good person.”
That memorandum also recalls a now-infamous exchange that was leaked to the media in which Trump allegedly told Comey “that he needed loyalty and expected loyalty.”
The memoranda were provided to Congress on Thursday by the Department of Justice. Reactions were predictably partisan, with Democrats claiming the memos corroborated Comey’s earlier statements about Trump, and Republicans claiming the memos show Comey never felt Trump was trying to obstruct justice.
Comey told Congress last year that he leaked the content of the memos after he was fired with the explicit intent of triggering the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the president’s 2016 campaign.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.