David Jackson

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — In a flood of angry tweets Friday morning, President Trump threatened to cancel press briefings as he continues to grapple with the fallout from his abrupt firing of his FBI director and the conflicting stories he and his aides have told about it.

"As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!" Trump said. "Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future "press briefings" and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???"

In a striking reversal one day earlier, Trump told NBC News that he planned to fire Comey even before meeting with top-ranking Justice Department officials and soliciting their recommendations on his performance.

"I was going to fire regardless of (their) recommendation," Trump said in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt, calling Comey a "showboat" and "grandstander" who led the agency into turmoil.

He also specifically brought up the ongoing Russia investigation. "In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself – I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story," Trump told NBC. "It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should've won."

These reasons contradicted the White House's assertions — and even the widely disseminated termination letter Trump sent Comey — that the dismissal was based on the recommendations of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who criticized Comey's handling of the email investigation into Hillary Clinton last year.

Trump's statements raised even more questions about his decision to fire the FBI director who was running an investigation into possible collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russians seeking to influence the 2016 presidential election.

That coverage of the Comey story prompted the Friday tweetstorm from the president, who also continued to loudly deny that he or his team had anything to do with Russia's hacking Democrats during the 2016 election.

While Democrats continue to decry the timing of Comey's firing was a way to short-circuit the ongoing counterintelligence probe, Trump tweeted that is is all politics: "Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election."

In yet another tweet, Trump called the investigation into his campaign associates’ ties to Russia a “witch hunt,” insisting that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said there was no collusion.

Clapper has said the intelligence community’s report on Russian hacking, which he oversaw, did not include any any evidence of collusion. Clapper also said he was unaware of the ongoing FBI investigation itself until Comey disclosed it publicly in March. But that's not the same thing as saying, definitively, that no collusion took place.

Trump also took to Twitter to make an apparent threat to Comey not to leak to the press: "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"

It is not known whether Trump tapes his conversations.

But the majority of Trump's rant focused on one of his favorite topics – the media. "The Fake Media is working overtime today!"

Trump has frequently attacked the press during his four months in office. He's made cracks about "fake media" and threatened to change libel laws. But this appears to be the first time he has gone so far as to threaten to do away with briefings altogether, though briefly during the presidential transition, Trump aides had discussed moving press out of the briefing room.

The White House Correspondents Association objected to Trump's threat. Shutting down news briefings, the association said in a statement, "would reduce accountability, transparency, and the opportunity for Americans to see that, in the U.S. system, no political figure is above being questioned."

Typically, when presidents make decisions of this magnitude, there's a clear plan in place to communicate that decision to the press — and the American public. Comey is only the second director to be fired in the 82-year history of the FBI, and some journalists found it remarkable that there seemed to be such confusion at the White House among key aides.

News of Comey's firing took many White House officials by surprise, forcing them to scramble to provide explanations that proceeded to change in the hours and days after the news broke.

The White House schedule for Friday lists a 1:30 p.m. ET briefing to be conducted by White House press secretary Sean Spicer.