WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump demanded “loyalty” from the director of the FBI, James Comey, and tried to get him to end the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Comey plans to say in testimony on Thursday.

Comey’s remarks conflict with Trump’s claim that he never made such a request to close the Flynn probe. They corroborate a New York Times report in May that Trump had dismissed as entirely false. And they may produce more questions about whether the president tried to obstruct justice.

Comey, whom Trump fired in May, is scheduled to make a hotly anticipated appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. His opening statement, released by the committee Wednesday at Comey’s request, suggests he will confirm the reporting Trump described as “fake news” and the product of invented anonymous sources.

Comey will do so on wall-to-wall television. All of the major U.S. networks planned to cancel regular programming to broadcast the testimony live.

Trump’s defenders seized on the two parts of the seven-page statement that were helpful to him. Comey, they noted, confirmed Trump’s claim that he had told Trump he was not personally under investigation. And Comey said he did not believe Trump was asking him to abandon the entire investigation related to his campaign’s dealings with Russia, just the Flynn component.

“The president feels completely and totally vindicated,” Trump’s lawyer on the Russia matter, Marc Kasowitz, said in a statement.

On the whole, though, the testimony is likely to be damaging to Trump. Comey paints a portrait of a president who, at very least, behaved inappropriately on numerous occasions — trampling boundaries between the White House and law enforcement and attempting to ensnare his FBI director in a relationship of improper dependence.

An hour after Kasowitz issued his statement, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, issued a statement that suggested Trump was not entirely thrilled.

Comey’s testimony “needs to be carefully scrutinized,” Cohen said, since it makes reference to former British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier of allegations about Trump and Russia. Cohen claimed Steele had “debunked” the dossier, though that is not true.

Comey said he had nine one-on-one conversations with Trump in four months, though he had only two with Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, in three years. He outlined five of them in his testimony, omitting anything about the other four.

The most notable of the five exchanges came on Feb. 14, when he said Trump insisted on speaking to him alone in the Oval Office.

Trump made Attorney General Jeff Sessions and adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner leave the room, Comey said, then began, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.”

Flynn had been forced out of his job the previous day amid a controversy over his failure to disclose contacts with Russian officials. Trump, according to Comey, said, “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.”

In perhaps Comey’s most important sentence, he said he “understood the president to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December.”

He did not think Trump was asking him to drop the broader probe. But “it was very concerning,” he said, “given the FBI’s role as an independent investigative agency.”

Comey’s testimony vividly describes other difficult moments with the president, which Comey said he documented in writing right after they happened. He did not feel compelled to document his interactions with Obama, he said.

Read more: Key excerpts from former FBI director James Comey’s upcoming testimony

His accounts are rife with colourful specifics. In his recap of a Trump phone call of March 30, he said the president told him “he said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia.” If Comey utters that sentence on Thursday, he will indirectly put on the public record a salacious unconfirmed Steele report that many news outlets had been unwilling to mention.

Comey described a meeting on Jan. 27 as particularly uncomfortable. In a private dinner at the White House, Comey said, Trump told him, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”

Comey said: “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner.”

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Eventually, he said, he told Trump, “You will always get honesty from me.” Trump, he said, said he wanted “honest loyalty.” Seeking to end the “very awkward conversation,” Comey said he paused, then said, “You will get that from me.”

The whole encounter made him uneasy, Comey said: at one point, Trump bizarrely asked him if he wanted to remain in the job for which he had seven years remaining in his term. He said he believed the dinner “was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship.”

In their last conversation, on Apr. 11, Comey said the president asked him to “get out” the message that he was not personally a subject of the counter-intelligence investigation, as Comey had told him directly. Comey said he advised Trump to make the request through the Department of Justice.

“He said he would do that,” Comey said, “and added, ‘Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing you know.’ I did not reply or ask him what he meant by ‘that thing.’ I said only that the way to handle it was to have the White House Counsel call the Acting Deputy Attorney General. He said that was what he would do and the call ended. That was the last time I spoke with President Trump.”

He did not tell Trump, he said, that both Justice and the FBI were both reluctant to issue a public declaration — “most importantly” because they would have then had to publicly declare that he was being investigated if the situation changed.