FIXATED ON GOLDEN SHOWERS
Comey reveals that President Donald Trump was fixated on proving the tape claim was false.
The very first time they met was when Comey privately told the then-president elect about the dossier- drawn up by ex-British spy Christopher Steele – which alleged there was a ‘kompromat’ tape from his visit to Moscow.
It purported to show Russian prostitutes defiling a bed in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton where President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama had stayed – because Trump wanted to humiliate the president.
Comey told him it was in wide circulation and later it was published by Buzzfeed.
Comey says Trump interrupted him as he described the material in the dossier.
He ‘strongly denied the allegations, asking — rhetorically, I assumed — whether he seemed like a guy who needed the service of prostitutes.
‘He then began discussing cases where women had accused him of sexual assault, a subject I had not raised. He mentioned a number of women, and seemed to have memorized their allegations.’
He describes Trump as ‘obsessed’ with the portions of the dossier dealing with prostitutes.
But amazingly, that was not to be the last time Trump issued a specific denial.
Days before his inauguration there was a phonecall where Trump said he was a ‘germophobe’.
‘There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way,’ he said.
In the phone call he claimed that he had not stayed overnight in Moscow and had only used the room to change his clothes.
‘I decided not to tell him that the activity alleged did not seem to require either an overnight stay or even being in proximity to the participants,’ the Washington Post reveals Comey writes.
That was not Trump’s last time on the subject.
On March 27 in the course of another call he said: ‘Can you imagine me, hookers. In an apparent play for my sympathy, he added that he has a beautiful wife and the whole thing has been very painful for her.’
Former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claims she had an affair with Trump, says he once tried to pay her after sex.
‘After we had been intimate, he tried to pay me, and I actually didn’t know how to take that,’ she told CNN. The White House has denied Trump was involved with the women who have accused him of having affairs.
Obama knew about the allegations and asked Comey the day before the FBI boss and other intelligence chief were due to meet Trump who would tell the president-elect about the dossier.
‘He raised and lowered both of his eyebrows with emphasis, and then looked away,’ Comey writes.
‘To my mind his Groucho Marx eyebrow raise was both subtle humor and an expression of concern.’
TRUMP THE MAFIA DON
He recounts that his first meeting with Trump was at Trump Tower when he and other officials went to brief the president-elect and senior members of his team about Russian efforts to interfere in the election.
‘I sat there thinking, Holy crap, they are trying to make each of us ‘amica nostra’ – friend of ours. To draw us in,’ Comey writes.
‘As crazy as it sounds, I suddenly had the feeling that, in the blink of an eye, the president-elect was trying to make us all part of the same family and that Team Trump had made it a ‘thing of ours.”
Others in the meeting included Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, Michael Flynn, who would become national security adviser, and incoming press secretary, Sean Spicer.
Comey was also joined by NSA Director Mike Rogers, CIA Director John Brennan and DNI Director James Clapper.
Comey says Trump only asked one question, the Washington Post revealed: ‘You found there was no impact on the result, right.’
But Clapper told him that there was no such analysis.
After Clapper briefed the team on the intelligence community’s findings of Russian election interference, Comey said he was taken aback by what the Trump team 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.
It was the next meeting – the private dinner – when Trump demanded loyalty.
‘You will always get honesty from me,’ Comey writes that he responded.
‘That’s what I want, honest loyalty,’ Trump said. ‘You will get that from me,’ Comey responded.
Comey says he was a mob prosecutor in his earlier career as an assistant district attorney in New York – and that it provided a flashback.
‘The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview,’ he writes.
‘The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.’
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN… ARE INADEQUATE
Comey repeats his claim that Trump said to him, weeks later, that he should give up the investigation into Flynn, who is now a felon after admitting lying to the FBI in a plea deal with Mueller.
Comey says that on reflection he should have told Trump it was ‘inappropriate’ but writes: ‘But if he didn’t know what he was doing was inappropriate, why had he just ejected everyone, including my boss [Jeff Sessions] and the vice president, from the room so he could speak with me alone?’
He takes a personal swipe at Sessions, comparing him to Alberto Gonzales, George W Bush’s attorney general unfavorably.
Both men he says were overwhelmed and overmatched by the job’ but Sessions lacked the kindness which his predecessor had.
Comey says he confronted sessions, telling him: ‘You can’t be kicked out of the room so he can talk to me alone. You have to be between me and the president.’
He writes: ‘Sessions just cast his eyes down at the table, and they darted quickly back and forth, side to side. He said nothing. I read in his posture and face a message that he would not be able to help me.’
And Comey he takes a swipe at Reince Preibus, calling him ‘confused and irritated’ as Trump’s first chief of staff.
CLINTON: JE NE REGRETTE RIEN (ALMOST)
Comey writes that he regrets his approach and some of the wording he used in his July 2016 press conference in which he announced the decision not to prosecute Clinton.
He writes that he himself can be ‘stubborn, prideful, overconfident and driven by ego.’
He famously chided Clinton for being ‘extremely careless’ in her handling of her classified email in a June 2016 press conference.
But he says he believes he did the right thing by going before the cameras and making his statement, noting that the Justice Department had done so in other high profile cases.
Every person on the investigative team, Comey writes, found that there was no prosecutable case against Clinton and that the FBI didn’t find that she lied under its questioning.
The parts about Clinton will be heavily scrutinized by her supporters – and by the failed presidential candidate herself, whose bitter public condemnations of Comey, he writes, have resonated with him.
‘I have read she has felt anger toward me personally, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that I couldn’t do a better job explaining to her and her supporters why I made the decisions I made.’
But he says that he stands by his handling of the Clinton probe and that he had only two regrets.
One was calling her and her staff’s handling of classified information ‘extremely careless’ because it sounded like the criminal burden for charges of mishandling intelligence, that she had been ‘grossly negligent’.
And he says his family accused him of ‘Seacresting’ his announcement early in July 2016 that Clinton would not be charged by building up a tease to her being cleared instead of starting with it.
Comey said his wife and daughters voted for Clinton and even participated in the Women’s March the day after Trump’s Inauguration.
He also explained he was so sure Clinton would win the election he worried that if he didn’t publicly announce the re-opening her email investigation in October 2016 following the discovery of emails from her on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, it would make her seem ‘illegitimate’.
‘I believed it was my duty to inform Congress that we were restarting the investigation,’ Comey writes.
He adds: ‘It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls.’
OBAMA PRAISED ME AFTER CLINTON LOST
Clinton claims that it cost her the election but Comey discloses an intriguing detail which may re-open the once-buried hostility between her and Obama: that Obama did not criticize him for what he did.
In fact the then president went out of his way to make sure he knew he was happy.
‘I picked you to be FBI director because of your integrity and your ability,’ Obama told him in the Oval Office after the election.
‘I want you to know that nothing – nothing – has happened in the last year to change my view.’
Comey is said to have written that he was close to tears.
‘Boy, were those words I needed to hear . . . I’m just trying to do the right thing,’ he told the president, who responded: ‘I know. I know.’
Obama was not the only Democrat who felt that way.
Comey briefed senators after the election and said that he was confronted by Al Franken – one of many figures the book to be disgraced in the last year, this time for groping – about his treatment of Clinton.
But Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority leader, who served in the Senate with Clinton as both partner and occasional rival, came to his defense, grabbing his hand and said: ‘You were in an impossible position.’
‘KELLY CALLED TRUMP DISHONORABLE’
He 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 a sense of disgust as to how Comey was dismissed, as well as his first encounter with Trump, a January 2017 briefing at Trump Tower in New York City.
Kelly has been increasingly marginalized in the White House and the president has mused to confidantes about firing the chief of staff.
At the time Comey got his unexpected pink-slip, the West Wing was roiled over what Trump saw as a nonstop drumbeat of FBI digging into unproven allegations that his presidential campaign colluded with Russians to impact the result of the election.
A senior White House official told the Daily Beast that the phone call Comey describes never happened.
Kelly, the official said, has described the call to other senior West Wing aides as lasting only a minute and summarized it as ‘I don’t know why you got fired, [and] best of luck to you.’
The former four-star Marine general’s version does not include calling President Trump ‘dishonorable’ – but unlike Comey it is not a public, on the record denial.
At the time Comey got his unexpected pink-slip, the West Wing was roiled over what Trump saw as a nonstop drumbeat of FBI digging into unproven allegations that his presidential campaign colluded with Russians to impact the result of the election.
A senior White House official told the Daily Beast that the phone call Comey describes never happened.
Kelly, the official said, has described the call to other senior West Wing aides as lasting only a minute and summarized it as ‘I don’t know why you got fired, [and] best of luck to you.’
The former four-star Marine general’s version does not include calling President Trump ‘dishonorable’ – but unlike Comey it is not a public, on the record denial.
WHITE HOUSE ATTACK PLAN
Comey’s account lands at a particularly sensitive moment for Trump and the White House.
Officials there describe Trump as enraged over a recent FBI raid of his personal lawyer’s home and office, raising the prospect that he could fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller, or try to shut down the probe on his own.
The Republican National Committee is poised to lead the pushback effort against Comey, who is set to do a series of interviews to promote the book, by launching a website and supplying surrogates with talking points that question the former director’s credibility.
Trump has said he fired Comey because of his handling of the FBI’s investigation into his Clinton’s email practices.
Trump used the investigation as a cudgel in the campaign and repeatedly said Clinton should be jailed for using a personal email system while serving as secretary of state. Democrats, on the other hand, have accused Comey of politicizing the investigation, and Clinton herself has said it hurt her election prospects.
Comey’s book will be heavily scrutinized by the president’s legal team looking for any inconsistencies between it and his public testimony, under oath, before Congress.
They will be looking to impeach Comey’s credibility as a key witness in Mueller’s obstruction investigation, which the president has cast as a political motivated witch hunt.