President calls Comey ‘slime ball’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump laced into James Comey as an “untruthful slime ball” on Friday as the White House and the national Republican Party mounted a withering counterattack against the former FBI director and his stinging new memoir.

Comey is embarking on a publicity rollout of his book, “A Higher Loyalty,” which offers his version of the highly controversial events surrounding his firing by Trump and the Russia and Hillary Clinton email investigations. In the book, Comey compares Trump to a mob boss demanding loyalty, suggests he’s unfit to lead and mocks the president’s appearance.

Press secretary Sarah Sanders stood at the White House podium Friday and called Comey “a liar and a leaker” whose loyalty is “only to himself,” adding that Comey will “be forever known as a disgraced partisan hack.”

Reading from prepared notes, she declared, “This is nothing more than a poorly executed PR stunt by Comey to desperately rehabilitate his tattered reputation and enrich his own bank account by peddling a book that belongs on the bargain bin of the fiction section.”

Anticipating broad media attention for Comey as his book tour gets underway, Sanders scolded reporters in advance for preparing to “cover it endlessly, all day today, all day tomorrow, and my guess is every day next week with very little time given to the issues that people care about.”

Unlike Michael Wolff’s “Fire & Fury,” which caught the White House unawares when it was published in January, the administration had weeks to polish its rebuttal rhetoric for Comey’s book. Officials responded to the Wolff book by belatedly pointing out factual inaccuracies. In responding to Comey, the White House is choosing not to engage on specific claims, which have been reviewed by lawyers for accuracy, instead launching a broadside effort to undermine Comey’s credibility.