Donald Trump said the former FBI director James Comey was not fired because of the Russia investigation in a tweet early on Wednesday, in a direct contradiction of statements he had made previously.

“Slippery James Comey, the worst FBI Director in history, was not fired because of the phony Russia investigation where, by the way, there was NO COLLUSION (except by the Dems),” Trump tweeted.



The statement does not square with Trump’s comments during a televised NBC News interview in May 2017 when he listed “this Russia thing” as one of the primary reasons he decided to fire Comey.

Trump also told Russian officials in the Oval Office that firing Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a New York Times report from the same month.

Trump and Comey have been at loggerheads ever since the former FBI head was fired on 9 May 2017, but the spat has escalated over the past week with the release of Comey’s new book and a televised interview in which Comey called Trump, among other things, “morally unfit” to be president.

Despite Trump’s own utterances on the topic, the White House has mostly maintained that Comey was fired for mishandling an inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails and that Trump had been losing confidence in him since the election.

The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, had also composed a memo criticising Comey in the same vein around the time that the FBI director was fired but Rosenstein and Trump have maintained that the president made the decision before he read any such memo.