From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily.

Today, the next batch of James Comey's memos, in them, Comey tells the president that he needs to stop trying to discuss ongoing investigations with him.

And, Comey shares his fears about Trump with a friend over lunch. That friend talks on the record and on tape to the Times.

It's Friday, May 19.

Michael, yes. Good to talk to you again. Thanks for having me.

Mike Schmidt is continuing to report on the interactions between FBI director James Comey and President Trump in the lead up to Comey's firing.

What is the latest from the Comey memos?

The latest we know is that President Trump called Mr. Comey several weeks after Trump took office and asked Comey whether he was under investigation.

And when the Justice Department was going to get word out on that and Comey told Trump, hey, you can't come to the FBI for investigative questions.

You got to follow the proper procedures, the DOJ guidelines and go to the Justice Department. This is not the way it's supposed to be.

So, the FBI director basically said it sounds to me stop calling me, stop basically.

Basically said, look, that there are lanes of the road that are established here to Comey, the independence of the FBI was the most important thing.

He didn't want them to be influenced at all by the President. And Comey basically said, look, there's a way that is set up for you to deal with the FBI.

And that doesn't include the President calling him to ask about investigations.

Let's talk about how you learned about these interactions that you're describing day after day. After you break a very hard break story, like the one that you did just a couple of days ago about the existence of the Comey memos and what they can tell us,

is it the case that more and more people just start coming forward? Is that what's happening here?

I think that if you're a Comey defender out there, you want as much sunlight on this as possible because they think that Comey did a lot of right things here and the President did a lot of wrong things here.

And I'm just pushing as hard as I can on a lot of doors in that world to try and find out everything I can about the interactions between the two of them.

So most of these conversations I'm going to imagine are off the record, but recently you found someone willing to talk on the record, right?

After we broke the story last week about this loyalty dinner where Trump had asked Comey to pledges loyalty to him at this one-on-one dinner at the White House.

A friend of Comey, this guy named Benjamin Wittis called me and he said, come over to my office, I want to talk.

So I went over to his office up the street and what it said, look, I had lunch with Comey in March.

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