Trump behaves like a Mob boss, says sacked FBI chief And you’re weak a slimeball, responds president in Twitter tirade
DONALD Trump branded ex-FBI director James Comey a ‘slime ball’ yesterday after he compared the US President to a Mafia boss.
A mudslinging match has erupted after excerpts from Mr Comey’s forthcoming memoir portray the Trump administration as behaving like a Mob family in its demand for loyalty.
Mr Comey also accuses Mr Trump of being a serial liar whose ‘presidency threatens the nation’. He even takes aim at the President’s appearance, writing that he has a ‘slightly orange’ face.
Mr Trump, who sacked Mr Comey in May last year, tweeted: ‘James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR.
‘He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH.’
The president called Mr Comey a ‘weak and untruthful slime ball who was ... a terrible Director of the FBI’ and said it had been his ‘great honour to fire him’.
In the memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies And Leadership, Mr Comey writes: ‘This President is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values. Mr Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation.’
Mr Comey led the FBI investigation into whether members of Mr Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. He says the President told him at a private dinner: ‘I want loyalty. I expect loyalty.’
Mr Comey writes that serving Mr Trump reminded him of the years he spent as a prosecutor investigating New York’s Mafia clans and their obsession with loyalty. ‘The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview,’ he writes. ‘The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organisation above morality and above the truth.’ The president spent months trying to ensure the FBI chief’s loyalty, holding a series of meetings and phone calls with him, he says. Mr Comey also recalls Mr Trump and his advisers plotting to put out a press release insisting Russian interference had had no impact on the election even as FBI chiefs insisted they had not established that. ‘I sat there thinking, “Holy c***, they are trying to make each of us an “amica nostra” – a friend of ours. To draw us in,’ he writes. ‘I suddenly had the feeling that, in the blink of an eye, the president-elect was trying to make us part of the same family.’
Mr Comey also claims the president asked him again and again to debunk unproven claims by exMI6 agent Christopher Steele that he once cavorted with Russian prostitutes in a hotel in Moscow.
Mr Steele’s dossier, which was leaked in January last year, claimed Mr Trump persuaded
‘A silent circle of assent’
prostitutes to urinate on a hotel bed for a depraved ‘golden shower’ show. The President has vehemently denied the claims.
Mr Comey even ridicules Mr Trump’s appearance. Of their first encounter, he writes: ‘His face appeared slightly orange with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles, and impressively coiffed, bright blond hair, which ... looked to be all his.’
Mr Trump is famously sensitive about claims he has small hands. Mr Comey writes of shaking his hand: ‘It was smaller than mine, but did not seem unusually so.’