Rep. Pete King said Friday that an inspector general ruling that former FBI director James Comey violated FBI policies with how he handled memos documenting his private conversations with President Donald Trump showed one of the most "disgraceful examples of abuse of power" he has seen.
"I have known Jim Comey for a number of years," the New York Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom."
"I was on the intelligence committee during the Russian investigation, the Homeland Security Committee, but I actually fell for his act for some time."
After reading the report, King said, he realized that Comey's actions weren't "occasional lapses. This is a systematic effort to go after candidate Trump."
The resulting investigation, after Comey leaked the memos and spurred a special counsel investigation, was an attempted "coup," said King, and "to have the most powerful law enforcement organization in the country be used by the director to bring this about is absolutely shameful."
He also accused Comey of trying to "entrap" Trump, after the report found that Comey had sprung some of the salacious details from the eventually discredited dossier by British spy Christopher Steele on him and then transmitted the president's reaction to the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
"He went out of his way to say he was only doing this for President Trump's own good, but of course, the FBI was not investigating the president," said King. "It's obvious now they were trying to set the president up and trying to trap him ... the FBI director trying to entrap the president of the United States based on a salacious document provided by Russian intelligence [and] paid for by the opposing campaign's committee."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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