Fired FBI Director, James Comey, is set to release his new book, A Higher Loyalty on April 17th and excerpts of the book attained by The Associated Press and other news outlets are already making headlines. The book is highly critical of President Trump.
The book recounts all of the high stakes situations that Comey found himself in throughout his career and, ultimately, explores his relationship with President Trump.
Comey was fired for what President Trump called his mishandling of the Clinton email investigation. The President also cited mistrust rank-and-file agents had of Comey as FBI Director. A characterization that is a matter of dispute between some current and former agents.
Comey offers a scathing critique of the President calling him “unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values.”
“His leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty,” Comey writes.
Comey also claims that President Trump asked him to investigate claims that he had affairs with Russian prostitutes while in Moscow in 2013. “It bothered [President Trump] if there was ‘even a one percent chance’ his wife, Melania, thought it was true,” Comey writes, according to the New York Post. “In what kind of marriage, to what kind of man,” Comey asks, “does a spouse conclude there is only a 99 percent chance her husband didn’t do that?”
In another section of the book, Comey likens Trump to Mafia crime bosses he helped put away when he was a New York prosecutor in the 1980s and 1990s. “The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth,” Comey writes.
He also discusses his controversial handling of the Clinton email scandal before the 2016 election, expressing regret about his approach and some of his wording at a 2016 press conference. But, he writes, he felt he did the right thing by going in front of cameras to announce the findings of the investigation and to recommend that no charges be brought against Clinton. No one at the FBI, he writes, found anything that they could prosecute Clinton for, and, he claims, Clinton didn’t lie to investigators they when she was questioned.
President Trump responded harshly to the allegations. “James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did-until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH,” he wrote on Twitter.
“He is a weak and…untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI. His handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton case, and the events surrounding it, will go down as one of the worst ‘botch jobs’ of history. It was my great honor to fire James Comey!”
For those who believe what is written in Comey’s book, the memoir will be a damning tale of just how bad things in Washington have gotten between institutions since Trump took office in 2017.
Photo by the FBI via Wikimedia Commons