President, allies denounce Comey over new memoir

WASHINGTON — Firing back at a sharply critical book by former FBI director James Comey, President Donald Trump blasted him Friday as an “untruthful slime ball,” saying, “It was my great honor to fire James Comey!”

Trump reacted on Twitter early Friday, the day after the emergence of details from Comey’s memoir, which says Trump is “untethered to truth,” and describes him as fixated in the early days of his presidency on having the FBI debunk salacious rumors he said were untrue but that could distress his wife.

The book, “A Higher Loyalty,” is to be released next week.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017, setting off a scramble at the Justice Department that led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation. Mueller’s probe has expanded to include whether Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey, which the president denies.

Trump has assailed Comey as a “showboat” and a “liar.” Top White House aides also criticized the fired FBI director on Friday. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders questioned Comey’s credibility in a tweet and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Comey took “unnecessary, immature pot shots.”

The former FBI director provides new details of his firing. He writes that then-homeland Security Secretary John Kelly — now Trump’s chief of staff — offered to quit out of disgust at how Comey was dismissed. Kelly has been increasingly marginalized in the White House, and the president has mused to confidants about firing him.

Comey also writes extensively about his first meeting with Trump after the election, a briefing in January 2017 at Trump Tower in New York City.

After then-director of National Intelligence James Clapper briefed Trump’s team on the intelligence community’s findings of Russian election interference, Comey writes, he was taken aback by what they didn’t ask.

“They were about to lead a country that had been attacked by a foreign adversary, yet they had no questions about what the future Russian threat might be,” Comey writes. Instead, he writes, they launched into a strategy session about how to “spin what we’d just told them” for the public.