According to the writer of the story, Michael Schmidt, the exchange was all written down in a memo by Comey after a meeting with Trump.
I mean, allegedly. And the memo was read off to him over the phone. Oh, wait, no -- not quite read off. His source saw it and vouchsafed for its authenticity. But he didn’t remember the exact wording.
Do you perhaps begin to see the problem here?
Schmidt revealed this during an interview on MSNBC with Brian Williams -- a man not exactly known for veracious rigor -- when The Times reporter was asked about his sources.
"We’d been working -- I’d been working on a story for the past few days about the fact that Comey had written these," Schmidt said. "We thought that was pretty significant in and of (itself)."