President Donald Trump attacked James Comey as a \u201cweak and untruthful slime ball\u201d on Friday after the fired former FBI director castigated him as an unethical liar and likened him to a mob moss in a searing new memoir.<\/p>\n
The president fired Comey last May while his agency was investigating potential collusion between Trump\u2019s campaign and Russia in the 2016 U.S. election in a move that led the Justice Department to appoint Special Counsel Robert Mueller to take over a probe that has hung over his presidency.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values,\u201d Comey said in the book due out Tuesday, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.<\/p>\n
Trump has often publicly criticized Comey since firing him, but escalated his attacks in response to the book.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was my great honor to fire James Comey!\u201d Trump said in one of a series of scorching Twitter messages, adding that Comey – now one of the Republican president\u2019s fiercest critics – had been a terrible FBI director.<\/p>\n
The tirade followed news accounts of Comey\u2019s book, \u201cA Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,\u201d which paints a deeply unflattering picture of Trump, comparing him to a mob boss who stresses personal loyalty over the law and has little regard for morality or truth.<\/p>\n
Mueller is looking into whether Trump has sought to obstruct the Russia probe, and Comey could be a key witness on that front. Comey last year accused Trump of pressuring him to pledge loyalty and end a probe involving former national security adviser Michael Flynn\u2019s contacts with Moscow.<\/p>\n
Trump accused Comey of lying to Congress, but did not specify was he was referring to, and said the former FBI chief should be prosecuted for leaking classified information.<\/p>\n
Trump has denied any collusion and has called Mueller\u2019s investigation a witch hunt.<\/p>\n
Comey is conducting a series of media interviews before the book\u2019s official release. Copies of the book were obtained by news outlets on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The interviews are Comey\u2019s first public comments since he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last June, when he accused Trump of firing him to undermine the FBI\u2019s Russia investigation. Just days after Trump fired Comey, the president said he did it because of \u201cthis Russia thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has launched a series of attacks since last year against U.S. law enforcement leaders and institutions as the Russia probe pressed forward, in addition to Comey and Mueller.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople will rot in hell for besmirching the reputation the integrity and the professional history of these two men,\u201d Democratic US Representative Jim Himes said on CNN, referring to Comey and Mueller, himself a former FBI director.<\/p>\n
In an offshoot of the Mueller probe, Trump\u2019s longtime personal lawyer\u2019s office and home were raided by the Federal Bureau on Investigation on Monday.<\/p>\n
In an interview broadcast on Friday on ABC\u2019s \u201cGood Morning America,\u201d Comey discussed his initial encounters last year with Trump, who took office on Jan. 20, 2017.<\/p>\n
He described Trump as volatile, defensive and concerned more about his own image than about whether Russia meddled in the presidential election.<\/p>\n
American intelligence agencies last year said Russia interfered in the election through a campaign of propaganda and hacking in a scheme to sow discord in the United States and help get Trump elected. Moscow has denied meddling.<\/p>\n
Comey said he cautioned Trump against ordering an investigation into a salacious intelligence dossier alleging an 2013 encounter involving prostitutes in Moscow.<\/p>\n
The dossier was compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele about Trump\u2019s ties to Russia and included an allegation that involved prostitutes urinating on one another in a hotel room while Trump watched.<\/p>\n
Trump denied the allegations and said he might want the FBI to investigate allegations in the dossier to prove they were untrue, Comey told ABC.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said to him, \u2018Sir that\u2019s up to you but you want to be careful about that because it might create a narrative that we\u2019re investigating you personally and, second, it\u2019s very difficult to prove something didn\u2019t happen,\u2019\u201c Comey said.<\/p>\n
Asked to describe that Jan. 6, 2017 meeting two weeks before Trump took office, Comey said: \u201cReally weird. It was almost an out-of-body experience for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Comey was asked if he believed the dossier\u2019s allegations.<\/p>\n
\u201cI honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don\u2019t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,\u201d Comey told ABC. \u201cIt\u2019s possible, but I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
Comey said the dossier\u2019s allegations had not been verified by the time he left the FBI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Donald Trump attacked James Comey as a \u201cweak and untruthful slime ball\u201d on Friday after the fired former FBI director castigated him as an unethical liar and likened him to a mob moss in a searing new memoir. The president fired Comey last May while his agency was investigating potential collusion between Trump\u2019s campaign […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27980,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27981,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27979\/revisions\/27981"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}