Comey: My Colleagues Were as Shocked as I Was By Trump Asking Us to Stop an Investigation

EXCERPT:

COMEY: "I think they were as shocked and troubled by it as I was. Some said things that led me to believe that. I don’t remember exactly. But the reaction was similar to mine. They are all experienced people who never experienced such a thing, so they were very concerned. And then the conversation turned to about, so what should we do with this information? And that was a struggle for us. Because we are the leaders of the FBI. So. it’s been reported to us and that I heard it and I've shared it with the leaders of the FBI, our -- our conversation was should we share this with any senior officials at the justice Department? Our absolute primary concern was we can’t infect the investigative team. We don’t want the agents and analysts working on this to know the president of the United States has asked — and when it comes from the president I took it as an direction to get rid of the investigation, because we're not going to follow that -- that request. And so we decided we got to keep it away from our troops. But is there anybody else we ought to tell in the Justice Department? And as I laid out in my -- in my statement, we considered whether to tell the attorney general, decided that didn’t make sense because we believed rightly that he would shortly going to recuse. There were no other Senate-confirmed leaders in the Justice Department at that point."