James Comey called out fake news and leakers during his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying that reports of collusion are “nonsense”.
Senator James Risch had asked Comey about the New York Times report that suggested the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russians using election surveillance. Comey shut that down about notion that there was any truth to the reports.
False reporting was such a distress for him that he surveyed the intelligence community to see what, if anything, he had missed and when he learned it was false he notified both major parties of the falsehoods.
“It was not true. … The challenge, and I’m not picking on reporters, about writing stories about classified information is the people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on, and those of us that actually know what’s going on are not talking about it,” Comey explained.
“And we don’t call the press to say, ‘hey, you got this thing wrong about this sensitive topic,’” he continued. “We just have to leave it there … nonsense. But I can’t go on explaining why it’s nonsense.”