Ex- FBI chief says Trump unethical
WASHINGTON: Former FBI director James Comey, in his book releasing next week, says US President Donald Trump had seemed fixated about proving false an encounter with prostitutes in Moscow that Russian intelligence had allegedly filmed.
Comey also compares the Trump presidency to “the Mob”, the mafia, which he had battled as a young prosecutor — “the silent circle of assent … the loyalty oaths … the ‘us-versus-them’ worldview … (and) the lying about all things, large and small”, according to portions cited from advance copies of the book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership” in multiple media reports on Thursday.
Trump hit back in a pair of tweets on Friday, calling him a proven “LEAKER AND LIAR … (and an) untruthful slimeball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI”.
“He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH,” he added.
From what has appeared in news reports, the book makes no explosive revelation but abounds in previously unreported details about encounters in the brief period the two men worked together — from the election to the time Comey learnt he had been fired from a news flash on TV during a field visit to California.
There are more details of the White House dinner at which Trump asked Comey for his loyalty, and of the meeting at which Trump asked his top FBI official to “let … go” of the probe into then national security adviser Michael Flynn’s Russia contacts.
The first time they discussed the alleged incident with prostitutes was in January 2017, after a briefing of then president-elect Trump by intelligence chiefs in Trump Tower.
Comey had stayed behind to tell Trump about the claims made in an intelligence document, now called the Steele Dossier after its author Christopher Steele, a former British spy.
Steele claimed Russian intelligence had photographed the encounter that took place in a Moscow hotel room in 2013 in which Trump had paid prostitutes to urinate on themselves and on the bed that former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama had slept in during a visit.
Trump had “strongly denied the allegations, asking — rhetorically,” Comey has written, “I assumed — whether he seemed like a guy who needed the service of prostitutes.”
Comey writes that Trump wanted the FBI to investigate the allegation to establish it as false.
“I’m a germaphobe,” Trump said to him in a follow-up call a few days later, according to Comey. “There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.”