Senate committees want Comey memos; intelligence panel asks him to testify

WASHINGTON – Two Senate committees have asked the FBI to turn over copies of any memos that former FBI Director James B. Comey wrote about his encounters with President Donald Trump.

The Senate Intelligence Committee invited Comey to testify before the panel and requested that the FBI turn over any memos alleging Trump sought to halt the bureau’s investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The committee hopes to have a response from the FBI within 72 hours, and expects to hear from Comey soon, possibly next week.

“We’ve reached out,” Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., told reporters Wednesday. “We hope to have a response.” The top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, said the panel invited Comey to testify in open and closed sessions.

“We don’t lack for questions,” Warner said. “I don’t think I know of any member I’ve talked to publicly or privately – Democrat or Republican – that doesn’t think that Jim Comey deserves a chance to tell his side of the story.”

Not long afterward, the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee made a similar request for all memos that Comey may have written about meetings with the president.

The Senate committees’ requests came as the chairman of House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, requested all “memoranda, notes, summaries, and recordings” between Trump and Comey.

Trump fired Comey last week, and the president said in a later interview that he was unhappy with the FBI’s probe into his campaign’s possible links to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump later warned the fired FBI director in a tweet that Comey had better hope that no “tapes” exist of their talks. The White House has refused to comment on whether such recordings were made. But if they exist, lawmakers also want those.

This week, it was reported that Comey wrote a private memo describing a meeting in which Trump allegedly asked him to stop the FBI review of Flynn, who was forced to resign earlier this year after the White House determined he had lied about his contacts with the Russians.