Twitter Reacts To Trump’s Dinner With Senators From Intelligence Committee Days Before James Comey Testimony

Two days before former FBI Director James Comey's hearing in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, President Donald Trump had dinner with two of its senators at the White House on Tuesday night. The Republicans who were to attend the dinner were Sens. Marco Rubio, Cory Gardner, Tom Cotton, and Todd Young and Reps. Lee Zeldin and Francis Rooney, a report said.

However, the attendance of Rubio and Cotton at the dinner has received criticism on social media. They are expected to ask Comey about his conversations with the president and whether Trump pressured Comey to end the FBI's probe into any ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, on Thursday.

Calls and messages to Rubio and Cotton’s Washington D.C. offices for comment on attending the dinner were not immediately returned.

Read: What To Expect From James Comey's Appearance Before Senate Intelligence Committee?

Twitter users said the integrity of both Rubio and Cotton will be tested after the dinner with Trump when they would be questioning Comey on Thursday about the Russian interference in the presidential election last year.

Some Twitter users even compared Tuesday's dinner to the dinner Trump and Comey had.

After Comey was fired, details of a dinner between him and Trump were leaked to the New York Times, which led to the president saying in a tweet Comey should hope there were no recordings of their conversations.

Trump had reportedly asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to him, which Comey had declined to do. Instead, Comey recounted to others he had told Trump he would always be honest with him, but that he was not “reliable” in the conventional political sense.

However, the White House said this account was incorrect and Trump too, in an interview with NBC, denied he had any of those conversations with Comey where the director was asked for his loyalty. It was not clear whether Trump was talking about the same dinner, but it is believed Trump and Comey had just one dinner together, the Times reported.

Days before Comey's testimony, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the principal deputy White House press secretary, said Monday the president would not invoke executive privilege to stop Comey from testifying.

“The president's power to assert executive privilege is well-established. However, in order to facilitate a swift and thorough examination of the facts sought by the Senate intelligence committee, Trump will not assert executive privilege regarding James Comey's scheduled testimony,” Sanders said.

Trump dismissed Comey from the post of FBI director May 9 over his handling of the investigation into Democrat Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. However, several Democrats reportedly linked the firing to Comey’s probe into the ties between Trump's associates and Russia during the 2016 election.

Trump claimed on several occasions that Comey told him multiple times that he was not under investigation, however, according to CNN, sources said that Comey will dispute Trump's claim and is expected to say that there were much more nuanced conversations from which the president concluded that he was not under investigation. Another source hinted that Trump may have misunderstood the exact meaning of Comey's words, especially regarding the FBI's ongoing counterintelligence investigation.