Former FBI director James Comey said Wednesday, “Personally, I don’t care, I wasn’t a big texter,” in response to President Donald Trump’s order to the bureau to release a slew of his text messages. | Carsten Koall/Getty Images Legal Comey says he's not worried about Trump releasing his texts

Former FBI director James Comey said he's not worried by President Donald Trump’s order to the bureau to release a slew of his text messages, saying he "wasn’t a big texter" when he was at the law enforcement agency.

Trump’s sudden Monday move to release Comey’s communications also included an order to declassify 20 pages of a 2016 surveillance application targeting former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and to release Justice Department official Bruce Ohr’s notes related to the Russia probe.


“Personally, I don’t care, I wasn’t a big texter,” Comey told St. Louis Public Radio in a Wednesday interview, adding that he also wasn't concerned about anything he said in emails becoming public. “I have a separate worry, which is institutional…You don’t want to do anything in disclosing information that’s connected to an intelligence investigation that would either screw up pending investigations or send a message to future sources that we can’t be trusted to protect you.”

Trump has long railed, often via Twitter, against special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into his dealings with Russia and whether any Trump aides helped Moscow interfere in the 2016 election. Trump often dismisses the probe as a “hoax.”

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On Tuesday, the president mounted his latest assault on the Mueller inquiry, calling it “truly a cancer” and praising his decision to make the files public as a “great service to the country.”

Republicans have claimed the FBI unfairly used a dossier of material on Trump compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele to obtain the surveillance warrant for Page, even though the bureau has said the dossier was not the basis of its investigation. Republicans also have focused on Ohr, who served as a link between the Justice Department and Steele.

Asked how releasing a new tranche of files might help Trump, Comey said: “I don’t know.”

“I’ve seen Republicans on the Hill and the president say the next revelation will show that the FBI acted in a bad way, and each revelation shows that the FBI conducted itself — as I know we did — in a professional routine, upholding the rule of law at every turn,” Comey added.

Trump ousted Comey in May 2017, but he said recently he should have acted earlier.

“If I did one mistake with Comey, I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him the day I won the primaries,” the president said.

Comey also said Trump’s actions and rhetoric have the potential of disrupting the work of the Department of Justice, especially with regard to the uncertainty surrounding embattled Attorney General Jeff Sessions, against whom the president also lashed out Tuesday.

“It’s become so blatant and so repeated and with so little follow-up,” Comey said of Trump’s repeated spats with Sessions. “In a way, I think it’s now just noise to the Department of Justice…There’s some circus going on above them.”

