NBC News reports: Despite what President Donald Trump said earlier in the day, James Comey did not seek a dinner with the president to retain his job, one current and one former FBI official close to Comey told NBC News Thursday evening.

The January dinner meeting between the two men, the sources said, was requested by the White House. And the former senior FBI official said Comey would never have told the president he was not under investigation — also contradicting what Trump said.

“He tried to stay away from it [the Russian-ties investigation],” said the former official, who worked closely with Comey and keeps in touch with him. “He would say, ‘look sir, I really can’t get into it, and you don’t want me to.'”

A current FBI official confirmed that Comey did not request the one-on-one dinner, which happened at the White House a few days after Trump was sworn in. [Continue reading…]

Given that Comey’s position as FBI director was set to continue until the end of its term in 2023 — by which time it’s reasonable to assume that Trump would at least be out of office if not in jail or exile — why would Comey go as supplicant, asking to be able to stay in his job? Least of all, why would he be ingratiating himself in front of the man who was the direct beneficiary of Comey’s ill-conceived intervention in the 2016 election?

Either Emperor Trump is, as is his habit, simply lying. Or, incapable of differentiating between fantasy and memory, he has reconstructed a version of events that corresponds with the power dynamics he desired rather than the actuality he encountered.