Report: James Comey asked for more resources to investigate Trump-Russia ties. Then he was fired.

The New York Times just posted a bombshell report about President Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey. Seriously, it’s huge:

Days before he was fired, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in money and personnel for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to three officials with knowledge of his request.

The report, from Matthew Rosenberg and Matt Apuzzo, goes on to note that Comey asked for the resources during a meeting with Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who just so happened to recommend firing Comey this week.

NBC News and the Washington Post have confirmed the Times’s report. But the Department of Justice has already denied the Times’s findings.

In a letter recommending Comey’s firing, Rosenstein argued that the former FBI director handled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server so poorly that it caused the public to lose trust in the FBI. It cited, for instance, a press conference last year in which Comey criticized Clinton’s handling of her private email server, even as he admitted that the FBI didn’t uncover evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Critics of Trump’s decision to fire Comey, however, aren’t buying it. They say Trump, based on other reports and the president’s own words, wanted to put an end to the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia, so he fired Comey, the person in charge of the agency investigating the Trump-Russia ties.

The New York Times report doesn’t prove that putting an end to the talk about Russia was definitely Trump’s motive. But the report is very suggestive.

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