Donald Trump is dining at the White House Tuesday night with two senators who will question former FBI Director James Comey Thursday.
Sens. Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Todd Young, Cory Gardner, and Reps. Francis Rooney and Lee Zeldin have all been invited to dinner with the president in the residence at 6:30 p.m. Rubio and Cotton, who are both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, are then scheduled to question Comey during an open and closed session hearing Thursday.
(Photo: Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images)
The committee said Comey will be questioned regarding Russian interference in the election. It will be the first time he has spoken publicly since he was fired by Trump in early May.
Trump will also meet with House and Senate leaders, including Speaker Paul Ryan, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Steve Scalise, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. John Cornyn Tuesday afternoon. He said he plans to discuss tax cuts and health care with them.
Press secretary Sean Spicer said the president hopes to discuss his overseas trip and the foreign policy challenges that he’s “ready to tackle.”
After Comey was fired, details of a dinner he had with the president leaked to the New York Times, which led Trump to imply on Twitter that there are recordings of conversations he had with him.
“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017
According to the report, Trump asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to him, but Comey refused, saying “he would always be honest with him, but that he was not ‘reliable’ in the conventional political sense.” Then, days later, the Times also reported that Comey alleged in a memo that Trump asked him to shut down the FBI investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn because “he is a good guy.”
White House spokesmen denied the nature of the meeting that was described in the memo, saying: “This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the president and Mr. Comey.”
Those officials have also declined to confirm or deny if Trump is recording conversations in the White House.