Trump tweets that he 'never fired James Comey because of Russia.' But he said on camera that he did.

(Image credit: Screenshot/NBC News)

published 31 May 2018

President Trump denied on Twitter Thursday morning a Wednesday evening report that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may have shielded the president by citing former FBI Director James Comey's handling of his agency's investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server — and not, as Trump proposed, anything about the probe into Russian election meddling — in the memo explaining Comey's firing:

Whether or not the report about Rosenstein is true, Trump's tweeted claim is wrong. In a major interview with NBC's Lester Holt last May, the president explicitly linked the firing to the Russia investigation. "And in fact when I decided to just do it," Trump recalled of his firing choice, "I said to myself, I said, 'You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.'"

If, like Trump, you need a refresher of that moment, watch below. Bonnie Kristian

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.