Comey wrote over four months early last year about his interactions with President Trump. Comey started writing the memos after his first one-on-one conversation with Trump in January and shared them with FBI leadership. He had not taken notes after his meetings with President Obama, but Comey has said he wanted to make a contemporaneous record of his discussions with Trump because he feared they could be misrepresented.
He clearly wrote them with an idea that they might become public. After Trump fired Comey in May, Comey wanted it known that Trump had pressured him to back off an FBI investigation of Michael Flynn, the national security advisor who was fired and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians.
Comey told a friend to share excerpts from the memos with reporters. That disclosure, which raised questions of possible obstruction of justice by Trump, was a factor in Deputy Atty. Mueller III. Comey writes that he grew increasingly uncomfortable in his meetings with Trump.
House Republicans have demanded numerous records from the Justice Department as they scrutinize how it handled both the Russia and the Clinton investigations. Devin Nunes R-Tulare , the House Intelligence Committee chairman, used some of the material to issue his own memo, which criticized court-approved eavesdropping of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide who visited Moscow during the campaign.
Republicans sought the Comey memos in hopes they would reveal contradictions between his writings at the time and his subsequent congressional testimony and memoir. Republicans highlighted that Comey never wrote before he was fired that Trump was obstructing justice in the Russia investigation.
