EXFBI CHIEF COMEY SAYS TRUMP ‘MORALLY UNFIT’ TO BE PREZ
WASHINGTON: Donald Trump is “morally unfit to be president” of the US and should be voted out, former FBI director James Comey has said, escalating the war of words with the man who fired him.
Impeaching Trump was not the right remedy, he told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, while speaking about his book that releases on Tuesday. A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Deception is an account, among other things, of his brief stint as Trump’s FBI chief, before being fired last May.
The president has already responded on Sunday, calling Comey “liar” and “slime ball” in a string of tweets just hours before the interview aired.
Trump watched bits of the interview, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters on Monday. “We didn’t learn anything new. Pretty much the same feelings. The president has been pretty clear what those are... comey is a self-admitted leaker.
“Been proven to be dishonest. And I think that his credibility is really at hand, and it’s quite interesting that he would question someone else’s when he has such a lack of credibility himself.”
Asked during the interview if he thought Trump was unfit to be president, Comey rode right in: “Yes”.
“But I don’t buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or early stages of dementia. He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who’s tracking conversations and knows what’s going on. I don’t think he’s medically unfit to be president. I think he’s morally unfit to be president.”
Comey proceeded to list out reasons: the president’s “moral equivalence” on Charlottesville race clashes — when Trump spoke of good people on both sides and his treatment of women like “pieces of meat”, among other things.
But impeaching him was not the right remedy, Comey said, when asked directly. And, realising that his reason for disagreeing would appear unusual, he prefaced his reply thus: “I’ll give you a strange answer.”
“Because I think impeaching and removing Donald Trump from office would let the American people off the hook and have something happen indirectly that I believe they’re duty bound to do directly. People in this country need to stand up and go to the voting booth and vote their values.”