Comey tweets ‘enemies’ line that Trump tweeted on day of memo on policy for ‘employees who may threaten national security’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Reacting to Donald Trump’s fury over a New York Times report that said the FBI investigated whether the president was working for Russia after he fired James Comey, Comey himself tweeted a quote by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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“I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made,” the former FBI director wrote on Saturday, adding an attribution: “FDR.”

It soon became clear the tweet almost exactly matched one by Trump, issued on 21 November 2012, when the then reality TV star was digesting the re-election of Barack Obama.

“I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made,” Trump wrote, adding a slightly longer attribution: “Franklin D Roosevelt.”

The quote is from a speech in Portland, Oregon, on 21 September 1932, in which Roosevelt, then a candidate for the White House, attacked the behaviour of owners of public utilities. According to documents made available online by the 32nd president’s library, he told his audience: “My friends, judge me by the enemies I have made”, and was greeted with “cheers, prolonged applause”.

The Times article, published on Friday night was greeted with a mass intake of breath. It concerned FBI attempts to determine whether the president was a Russian asset. The president’s reaction to the report included a failure in a Fox News interview to deny he had “ever worked for Russia” and familiar abuse of the FBI director he fired in May 2017. It all made the congruence in their tweets seem amusing.

But it seems Comey might have been making a sharper point. 21 November 2012, the date of Trump’s FDR tweet, was also the date of a presidential memorandum issued by Obama. Its subject: “National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs.”

In the memo, Obama defined its purpose as “to provide direction and guidance to promote the development of effective insider threat programs within departments and agencies to deter, detect, and mitigate actions by employees who may represent a threat to national security.

“These threats encompass potential espionage, violent acts against the Government or the Nation, and unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”

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According to White House practice, the memo followed a 2011 executive order on “Structural Reforms to Improve the Security of Classified Networks and the Responsible Sharing and Safeguarding of Classified Information”.

The Times report said the FBI was worried about Trump’s behavior, including repeatedly linking the firing of Comey to investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and links between Trump aides and Moscow, and in an infamous Oval Office meeting with Russia’s foreign minister shortly after the firing.

Trump attacked the report again in his Saturday night interview with Fox News, saying it was “a great insult and the New York Times is a disaster of a paper. It’s a very horrible thing they said.”

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Also on Saturday, the Washington Post reported that Trump has “gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations” with Vladimir Putin, including “on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired”.

In the 2012 memo, Obama wrote that he wanted to “reinforce our defenses against both adversaries and insiders who misuse their access and endanger our national security”.

Obama appointed Comey director of the FBI in 2013. At the time of the order and memorandum, he was out of government. Since his firing by Trump, he has published an explosive and bestselling memoir and stringently criticised the president.

The memo and Trump’s tweet being issued on the same day could of course be a coincidence. But on Sunday, a source who worked in the first Bush justice department told the Guardian that either way, “Comey is making a point: ‘Trump’s my enemy. That says plenty about me.’”

Comey did not immediately comment further on Saturday but he did tweet about a trip to see a Broadway show: “The perfect day to see To Kill a Mockingbird … Amazing cast and vital message: ‘All rise.’”