Trump didn't really know Bill and Bob were best buds. Ooops.

“Are you best friends with Robert Mueller?” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked Comey, according to a transcript of the hearing released Saturday by Goodlatte and Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).

“I am not,” Comey said. “I admire the heck out of the man, but I don't know his phone number, I've never been to his house, I don't know his children's names.”

Comey added: “I think I had a meal once alone with him in a restaurant. I like him. I am not a — I'm an associate of his who admires him greatly. We're not friends in any social sense.”

Hours before Comey’s session with members of Congress, Trump tweeted: “Robert Mueller and Leakin’ Lyin’ James Comey are Best Friends, just one of many Mueller Conflicts of Interest.” The president went on to call the special counsel’s investigation “A total Witch Hunt” in that same post.

Trump previously referred to Mueller as Comey’s “best friend” in a September interview with The Daily Caller, and claimed to have “100 pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other.”

The president’s pick to replace Jeff Sessions at the helm of the Justice Department has known and admired the president’s bête noire, Robert Mueller, for 30 years — and somehow President Donald Trump seems fine with that.

The relationship, which Barr described in public Tuesday during his Senate confirmation hearing, is both a source of reassurance to Democrats worried about Barr’s attitude toward Mueller’s probe and a reminder of the small size of Washington’s legal and law enforcement worlds.

Why it isn’t more troubling to Trump, who, Barr said, is aware of the relationship, remains a mystery.

Barr and Mueller first crossed paths at the Justice Department during the George H.W. Bush administration. But the relationship goes further: Their wives are close friends who attend Bible study together, and Mueller attended the weddings of two of Barr’s daughters.

“They have a high level of respect for each other,” said Paul McNulty, a former senior DOJ official who led the department’s policy and communications shop while Barr was attorney general and Mueller served as the head of its Criminal Division. “They have maintained a good friendship ever since.”

President Donald Trump was startled Tuesday as he watched television coverage of his nominee for attorney general describing a warm relationship with the special counsel Robert Mueller in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to three people familiar with the matter.

During the first day of his confirmation hearing, William Barr described telling the President the first time he met him in June 2017 that he was friends with Mueller, referring to him on a first name basis.

"I told him how well I knew Bob Mueller and that the Barrs and Muellers were good friends and would be good friends when this was all over," Barr said. "Bob is a straight-shooter and should be dealt with as such."

While Barr said during his hearing that Trump "was interested" in hearing about the friendship, the details that emerged this week caught the President off guard, the three sources said. He bristled at Barr's description of the close relationship, complaining to aides he didn't realize how much their work overlapped or that they were so close.