Comey fires at Trump
He says president may be compromised
Donald Trump appears to “lack an external moral framework” and is “morally unfit to be president,” former FBI Director James Comey told USA TODAY in a frank, exclusive interview Friday.
It is among the observations from his book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” which is to hit stores Tuesday.
Comey also said the theory that Russia sought to interfere with the 2016 election is “consistent with utterly independent intelligence.”
Delving into the events of the 2016 campaign, he said he holds out hope that Hillary Clinton might read about the probe of her emails and upgrade her opinion of him, from “idiot” to “kind of an honest idiot.”
McLEAN, Va. — In an extraordinary interview, former FBI director James Comey called Donald Trump “morally unfit to be president” and said he believed it was possible the Russians were holding compromising personal information over the head of the commander in chief.
Comey’s comments and his new book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies,
and Leadership, are fueling a combustible moment in Washington that could become a constitutional crisis. At the White House, Trump has unleashed a barrage of angry tweets against Comey — calling him an “untruthful slime ball,” among other insults — amid reports he was poised to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for his role in the Russia investigation that Comey once headed.
Never before in American history has a current or former director of the FBI, the nation’s principal law-enforcement agency, publicly described a president in such a scathing manner.
“I actually believe he’s morally unfit to be president,” Comey told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview Friday at his home in the Virginia suburbs outside Washington. He called that characterization appropriate for “someone who is able to see moral equivalence in (white nationalist protests in) Charlottesville or to speak and treat women like they’re pieces of meat and to lie constantly and who appears to lack an external moral framework” of religion or philosophy or history.
In even an more explosive com-
“There’s a non-zero possibility that the Russians have some, some sway over him that is rooted in his personal experience.”