The White House denied it in a statement. It reads, in part: "The President has never asked Mr Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn. The President has the utmost respect for our law enforcement agencies, and all investigations. This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the President and Mr Comey."
According to Comey's purported memo, read to New York Times reporters by an associate, Trump said in their conversation: "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go".
It seems as though the flood of information over the past 10 days has been pushing us to a point that we haven't yet reached, forcing an explicit choice between the word of the White House and the word of an outside party.
The Post's story about the revelation of classified information came close, but the carefully worded Administration responses released yesterday didn't constitute a robust denial of our story. In this case, the denial of the New York Times report is explicit. Trump's White House says the report about the Comey memo is not "truthful or accurate".
Forcing the American public to decide: Whom do you believe, Trump or Comey? Or, in a layer of abstraction that will continue to complicate things, the White House or the reporting of the New York Times (and others, including the Post)?
There is a surfeit of circumstantial evidence that bolsters the idea that Trump pressured Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn.
- After Yates's testimony eight days ago, White House press secretary Sean Spicer was asked why Trump kept defending Flynn, despite his having been asked to resign for apparently lying to the vice-president. Spicer insisted that the President didn't want to "smear" Flynn, who is a "good man." (In Comey's memo, he's a "good guy".)
- Trump told NBC's Lester Holt that he was thinking of the Russia investigation when he decided to fire Comey, contrary to what his staff had been insisting.
- His dinner with Comey, in which he admits to asking the FBI Director whether he himself was under investigation, came the day after Yates informed the White House that Flynn's actions conflicted with what Vice-President Pence had said publicly - a conversation that revealed that the FBI was investigating Flynn.
Overlay that with Trump's repeated insistence that any investigations into Russia were suspect, and it certainly seems believable that he might have tried to twist Comey's arm on the investigation into Flynn.
But we've seen repeatedly that in a believability contest between Trump and A Number of Other People, Trump often, somehow, emerges the victor.
At least with the core base of support he has enjoyed over the course of his brief time in politics - a base of support that constitutes a big chunk of the Republican electorate and, therefore, has seemingly frozen significant robust Republican criticism of Trump.
