Trump cries ‘slime ball’ after former FBI director slams him
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.”
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.
Sanders accused Comey of leaking classified infor- mation and breaking his “sacred trust with the president of the United States, the dedicated agents of the FBI and the American people.”
The Republican National Committee helped with the pushback effort against Comey by launching a website and supplying surrogates with talking points that question his credibility.
Comey acknowledged in congressional testimony last year that after he was fired he helped leak his personal, but unclassified, memos of his conversations with Trump to a reporter. In previous testimony, however, he said he never authorized an FBI subordinate to leak information about investigations of Trump or Clinton.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired last month, days before his retirement, following an internal review that accused him of being untruthful about his role in the leaking of damaging information on the Clinton email investigation. McCabe has suggested that Comey authorized the leak — a claim disputed in the independent inspector general report, which says McCabe allegedly misled Comey about the disclosure.
In a Friday tweet, Trump claimed without evidence that “McCabe was totally controlled by Comey — McCabe is Comey!! No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Bill Cosby’s chief accuser took the witness stand for the second time to tell a story of molestation and broken trust, describing for jurors how the comedian knocked her out with three blue pills and then sexually assaulted her at his home.
“I was weak. I was limp, and I just could not fight him off,” said Andrea Constand, who found herself in the same cavernous courtroom on Friday less than a year after a jury was unable to reach a verdict on charges against Cosby.
Her harrowing account of the events in 2004 was consistent with the one she gave at last year’s trial in suburban Philadelphia, and jurors listened intently as she told how Cosby, the good-guy celebrity she viewed as a mentor and friend, had betrayed her.
“Ms. Constand, why are you here?” prosecutor Kristen Feden asked. “For justice,” Constand said.
Black teen seeking directions shot at by white man
DETROIT — A black 14-year-old boy who got lost in a Detroit suburban neighborhood while trying to get to school was shot at by a white homeowner after knocking on a door to ask directions, prosecutors said Friday, citing home security video and the account of the boy.
Jeffery Zeigler, a retired Detroit firefighter, was arraigned Friday on charges including assault with intent to murder.
Oakland County sheriff’s deputies were called