President Donald Trump has fired FBI Director James Comey, the White House announced Tuesday afternoon.
"The president has accepted the recommendation of the attorney general and the deputy attorney general regarding the dismissal of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters in the briefing room.
Staff at the FBI have yet to be officially told.
“The FBI is one of our Nation’s most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement,” Trump said in a statement released by the White House.
Comey, 56, was nominated in 2013 as FBI director by President Obama for a 10-year term. He was praised for his independence and integrity and spent three decades in law enforcement, some of that time under fire.
The White House said Trump "acted based on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions" and that a search for a new permanent FBI director would "begin immediately."
In March, Comey announced with the authorization of the Justice Department that the bureau was investigating alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election.
The White House made the stunning announcement shortly after the FBI corrected a sentence in Comey's sworn testimony on Capitol Hill last week.
The director told lawmakers Huma Abedin, while she was a top aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, had sent "hundreds and thousands" of emails to her husband's laptop, including some with classified information.
On Tuesday, the FBI corrected that. A two-page letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee said that only "a small number" of the thousands of emails found on the laptop had been forwarded there, while most had simply been backed up from electronic devices.
This is a live story. Watch here for updates.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: NancyLBSmith. Information for this story came from CNN.com, The Hill newspaper, and FOX News
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