In May of 2017, in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s sudden firing of Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, a group of top FBI agents and officials suspected that Trump may have been “somehow following directions” directly from the Kremlin, and “somehow executing their will,” according to James Baker, then the FBI’s top in-house lawyer, in previously secret congressional testimony obtained by CNN .
The revelations from the previously confidential transcripts of Baker’s testimony come just four days after a blockbuster New York Times report revealed that after Comey was fired, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation of Trump to determine whether he was, in fact, an agent of Russia whose actions were designed to benefit Russia rather than the United States. The suspicions to which Baker testified appear to be at least part of the reason that investigation was opened.
“If the President of the United States fired Jim Comey at the behest of the Russian government, that would be unlawful and unconstitutional,” Baker testified, though he added that did not know whether that scenario was actually the case, according to the CNN report.
Baker also specified that the “theoretical possibility” that Trump was a Russian agent was only one in a range of possibilities considered by FBI officials at that point.
“There’s a range of things this could possibly be,” Baker told House representatives. “We need to investigate, because we don’t know whether, you know, the worst-case scenario is possibly true or the president is totally innocent and we need to get this thing over with — and so he can move forward with his agenda.”
Less than 24 hours after Trump fired Comey, Trump met in the Oval Office with two top Russian officials whose names emerged as central figures in the investigation into Russia’s manipulation of the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor, as Inquisitr reported.
In another unusual move, Trump barred all United States press outlets from covering his meeting with the two top Russian officials — Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergei Kislyak — but according to a record of the meeting that was later leaked and quoted by Vanity Fair , Trump boasted to the Russians, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
