WASHINGTON—U. S. President Donald Trump is accusing James Comey of perjury, saying the former FBI director lied under oath about a crucial Oval Office encounter.

Escalating his assault on Comey’s integrity, Trump said he never told Comey that he hoped the FBI would let former national security adviser Michael Flynn off the hook in some way.

“I didn’t say that. I will you tell you I didn’t say it,” Trump said Friday. He added: “And there’d be nothing wrong if I did say it, according to everybody that I’ve read today. But I did not say that.”

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Trump said he was “100 per cent” willing to go under oath to offer his own version to the special counsel who may be investigating whether he committed obstruction of justice.

Trump’s words came during a remarkable news conference during which he suddenly pledged to honour NATO’s mutual self-defence policy and broke sharply with his secretary of state’s attempt to calm the dispute between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

His effort to depict Comey as untruthful was a marked shift from the strategy of his Republican allies and even his lawyer.

Seeking to avoid a credibility battle between a former law enforcement chief and a president widely perceived as dishonest, Trump’s defenders had challenged Comey’s interpretations of the facts but not the facts themselves.

Trump, though, tweeted in the morning that Comey uttered “so many false statements and lies” — while also claiming “vindication.” At the afternoon news conference, with the president of Romania in the White House Rose Garden, Trump added that Comey said things that “just weren’t true.”

Comey, whom Trump fired in May, testified that he documented all of his conversations with the president in writing immediately after they happened. Trump is a frequent liar who has averaged two false claims a day since taking office in January.

“If you’re talking about a credibility contest here, I don’t think it’s going to be close,” said lawyer Nick Akerman, an assistant prosecutor in the Watergate case. “You’re dealing with a serial liar who hasn’t told the truth about much of anything.”

Trump has a long history of confidently promising to take action and then later declining to do so. U.S. analysts were skeptical that he would actually volunteer to testify about his exchanges with Comey. But his comments were still greeted with widespread astonishment.

“Charging into a perjury trap against an FBI director with contemporaneous memos & 3rd party witnesses is a novel legal strategy, to be sure,” former Department of Justice spokesman Matthew Miller wrote on Twitter.

Former FBI director Robert Mueller has been appointed to investigate whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Comey suggested Mueller is now looking at whether Trump committed obstruction. If Mueller wants to compel Trump to testify, Akerman and others said, Trump will not have a choice in the matter.

Flynn, once a top Trump ally, has been under investigation for possibly lying to federal investigators over his contact to Russia, among other matters. Trump was denying Comey’s testimony that Trump told him in February, after demanding that others leave the room, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”

Trump also contested another key Comey claim: that Trump repeatedly asked him, at a Jan. 27 dinner, to offer his personal “loyalty.” But Trump’s comments on this were so muddled that it was difficult to determine what he was actually saying.

“I hardly know the man, I’m not going to say I want you to pledge allegiance. Who would do that? Who would ask a man to pledge allegiance under oath?” Trump said, though Comey did not say Trump had asked him to pledge “allegiance” or to make any pledge under oath. “I mean, think of it. I hardly know the man. It doesn’t make sense.”

Trump would not answer directly when asked if he had recorded his conversations with Comey, though he threatened Comey on Twitter with the prospect of “tapes.” Pressed on the issue, he said the media would be “disappointed” when he revealed the answer.

He may be forced to come clean sooner than he would like. Soon after the news conference, the House Intelligence Committee wrote to the White House to request copies, by June 23, of any recordings — “to the extent they exist now” — of conversations between Comey and Trump.

Trump also made news Friday on subjects unrelated to Comey. In response to a question from a Romanian reporter, he promised to honour the NATO policy of defending any member that comes under attack.

Trump had shocked and dismayed European allies by refusing to commit to this policy, known as Article 5, in a May speech at NATO headquarters in Brussels — going so far as to delete from his speech a planned sentence that included the commitment. But the reporter’s question prompted him to make a major foreign policy declaration on the spot.

“I’m committing the United States to Article 5,” he said.

Trump’s opening statement added to global confusion about U.S. policy on the conflict in the Gulf region.

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Trump has frequently sabotaged his diplomats, sometimes appearing to improvise a separate and entirely incongruous foreign policy. This time, in scripted remarks just over an hour after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called on Saudi Arabia and its allies to ease their blockade against Qatar, Trump called Qatar a “funder of terrorism at a very high level.”

“We ask Qatar and other nations in the region to do more and do it faster,” Trump said. Then he praised Saudi Arabia and its king.

Trump’s relationship with facts was called into question during the same news conference. Asked if the he had discussed the issue of visa waivers with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, Trump said, “We didn’t discuss it.” Iohannis then said, “Yes … I mentioned this issue.”

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