Trump's attempt to intimidate Comey appeared to be in response to reports from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News that the former director had let it be known, through associates, that the president had lied in the termination letter he had his bodyguard deliver to FBI headquarters on Tuesday. The letter included a bizarre aside in which Trump claimed that he was grateful to the director for assuring him, in three conversations, that the president himself was not under investigation. Trump's claim, one associate of Comey's told the Journal, "is literally farcical."

Nonetheless, Trump repeated that claim in an interview with NBC News on Thursday, saying that he had first asked the director over dinner at the White House on January 27 if he was a subject of the federal investigation into possible collusion between his presidential campaign and the Russian government to undermine his rival, Hillary Clinton.