President Donald Trump, for a change, sees a reason to celebrate something written by former FBI Director James Comey.
The president tweeted Friday that Comey's memos about their meetings early last year "show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION."
The memos leaked to the media Thursday night after the Justice Department sent them to Congress. House Republicans had been pressuring the department to hand over the documents.
In the memos Comey wrote almost immediately after his meetings with Trump, the former FBI director goes into detail about their conversations. The memos include revelations regarding former national security advisor Michael Flynn and an unverified claim that Trump was with prostitutes in a Russian hotel room in 2013.
Trump's line of reasoning about what the memos show echoed the argument made by three leading House Republicans at the heart of the chamber's investigation into whether Russia meddled with the 2016 election.
The memos show that "former Director Comey never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened," according to Reps. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. "While former Director Comey went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts, he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation."
However, Comey has said that he was compelled to take such detailed notes precisely because he was concerned about his conversations with Trump.
"I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting so I thought it important to document," Comey told senators in a hearing last June, a month after Trump fired him. "That combination of things I had never experienced before, but had led me to believe I got to write it down and write it down in a very detailed way."
The former FBI director, whom Trump fired four months after their first meeting, has also said that it would be up for others to decide whether the president obstructed justice during their encounters.
It didn't take long Friday morning for Trump to resume his attacks on Comey, though.
"So General Michael Flynn's life can be totally destroyed while Shadey James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from a third rate book (that should never have been written)," the president said in another tweet.
Flynn, who was fired before he could serve a month as Trump's national security advisor, has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Comey's book, "A Higher Loyalty," was released Tuesday and is the top seller on Amazon.com.