The tweet that got James Comey to go to the press

Fired FBI Director James Comey saw a tweet from President Donald Trump and made a decision that will have untold ramifications.

“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump tweeted on the morning of May 12

It was that tweet, Comey told the Senate intelligence committee Thursday, that spurred him to leak contents of his memos documenting interactions with the President to the press.

“The President tweeted on Friday, after I got fired, that I better hope there’s not tapes,” Comey said. “I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally, that there might be corroboration for our conversation, there might be a tape.”

Comey, who wrote memos after his meetings with Trump, had shared the documents with fellow FBI officials. Asked during the Senate hearing if he shared the memos elsewhere, Comey explained he asked a “good friend” who is a “professor at Columbia law school” to be an intermediary with the press.

“My judgment was I needed to get that out into the public square. So I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter,” Comey said.

“I didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel, so I asked a close friend of mine to do it,” he said.

MORE: The tweet that got James Comey to go to the press – CNNPolitics.com