Trump pardons Cheney ex-aide
GOP goes on attack as harsh details of memoir are leaked
President Trump has granted a full pardon to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr., which some see as the president making a statement about him also being a target of an unfair prosecution.
WASHINGTON — James Comey’s searing tell-all book was met with an aggressive counterattack on his character by President Donald Trump and his allies on Friday, even as many Democrats struggled with conflicted feelings about the man they blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election.
In the book, Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director in May, describes the president as “unethical, and untethered to truth,” and writes that he often wondered about Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s attempt to influence the election. “Maybe it was a contrarian streak,” he wrote, “or maybe it was something more complicated that explained his constant equivocation and apologies for Vladimir Putin.” He also compares the president to a Mafia boss.
Pointed details from the book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” leaked out Thursday night before its official release Tuesday. The response from the president was personal and vicious, even by Trump’s standards.
In two early-morning tweets, the president called the former FBI director an “untruthful slime ball” and a “proven LEAKER & LIAR.” Trump said that it was his “great honor to fire” Comey.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, escalated the criticism later in the day, saying Comey will “be forever known as a disgraced partisan hack that broke his sacred trust with the president of the United States.”
The Republican National Committee joined in with an allhands effort to discredit Comey by distributing lengthy talking points to conservative pundits, sympathetic media hosts and Republican lawmakers.
Comey will have an opportunity to respond to his critics during a book tour that will take him to venues across the country. His first major interview, with ABC News, is scheduled to be broadcast Sunday night, though the network began airing clips Friday morning after the book leaked out.
Comey’s comparison of the president’s operating style to the Mafia — “The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The usversus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small” — might have been expected to please Democrats if it had come from someone else. But at least initially, he received a somewhat muted defense from Democrats still angry about the way he handled the investigation into Clinton’s private email server.
While they cheered on his fight with Trump, they argued that Comey should not have made public the email inquiry the way he did.
Trump’s decision to fire Comey in May 2017 eventually led to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia’s 2016 election meddling and whether Trump has deliberately tried to obstruct the investigation. In an extraordinary day of testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee the next month, Comey foreshadowed many of the themes of his book, describing how Trump had tried to derail an investigation of Michael Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser and accused the president of lying and defaming him and the FBI.
The former FBI chief ’s muchanticipated 304-page memoir is the first major memoir by one of the key characters in the Trump administration.