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Statement for the Record
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
James B. Comey
June 8, 2017
Chairman Burr, Ranking Member Warner, Members of the Committee.
Thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. I was asked to testify today
to describe for you my interactions with President-Elect and President Trump on
subjects that I understand are of interest to you. I have not included every detail
from my conversations with the President, but, to the best of my recollection, I
have tried to include information that may be relevant to the Committee.
January 6 Briefing
I first met then-President-Elect Trump on Friday, January 6 in a conference
room at Trump Tower in New York. I was there with other Intelligence
Community (IC) leaders to brief him and his new national security team on the
findings of an IC assessment concerning Russian efforts to interfere in the
election. At the conclusion of that briefing, I remained alone with the President-
Elect to brief him on some personally sensitive aspects of the information
assembled during the assessment.
The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the
incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious
and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to
publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of
the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the
extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt
any such effort with a defensive briefing.
The Director of National Intelligence asked that I personally do this portion
of the briefing because I was staying in my position and because the material
implicated the FBI’s counter-intelligence responsibilities. We also agreed I would
do it alone to minimize potential embarrassment to the President-Elect. Although
we agreed it made sense for me to do the briefing, the FBI’s leadership and I