White
House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump informed Comey that he had been
terminated and removed.
Spicer
also said the president’s decision was based on “the clear recommendations” of
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
A
search for a new permanent FBI director will begin immediately.
The
White House made the stunning announcement shortly after the FBI corrected a
sentence in Comey's sworn testimony on Capitol Hill last week.
The
director told congressional lawmakers that Huma Abedin, as top aide to
then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had sent "hundreds and
thousands" of emails to her husband's laptop, including some with
classified information.
On
Tuesday, the FBI said in a two-page letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee
that only "a small number" of the thousands of emails found on the
laptop had been forwarded there while most had simply been backed up from
electronic devices.
Most
of the email chains on the laptop containing classified information were not
the result of forwarding, the FBI said.
Comey
first ran into problems during the 2016 presidential race when he opened an
investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server system for emails while at
the state department.
He
concluded that Clinton, then the Democrat president nominee, had not acted
criminally with classified emails but said she had been “extremely careless.”
He
announced a second probe regarding the emails and Abedin’s handling of them in the
closing days of the race.
Clinton
has said that investigation largely contributed to her loss to Trump.
The
FBI and other members of the U.S. intelligence community, as well as Congress,
are now investigating the extent to which Russia was involved in stealing and
making public emails from Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“While
I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am
not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the
Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau,”
Trump said in a letter to Comey, obtained by Fox News.
Comey,
56, was nominated by President Barack Obama for the FBI post in 2013 to a
10-year term. Praised for his independence and integrity, Comey has spent three
decades in law enforcement and has been no stranger to controversy.
Source: Associated
Press and Fox News
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