James Comey Book: 5 Killer Excerpts From ‘A Higher Loyalty’

Former FBI director James Comey provides a scathing look at President Trump in the soon-to-be released book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies & Leadership,” calling the 45th president “unethical” and “untethered to the truth." In the book, due to be released on April 17, Comey writes that Trump’s “leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty.”

Trump fired Comey in May 2017 because of his handling of the FBI’s investigation into Democrat Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. Democrats have said Comey politicized the investigation.

At the time, the White House said the “FBI had been in turmoil” and “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in Comey,” an assertion at-the-time acting director Andrew McCabe denied. He said Comey “enjoyed broad support within the FBI, and still does to this day.” McCabe was fired in March.

In a pair of tweets Friday, Trump called Comey an “untruthful slime ball” and wrote that “his handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton Case, and the events surrounding it, will go down as one of the worst ‘botch jobs’ of history. It was my great honor to fire James Comey!” He also called Comey a “proven liar and leaker” and said he should be prosecuted.

Here are five takeaways from a manuscript released to several news outlets:

He says the news isn’t “fake”: "What is happening now is not normal,” he writes. “It’s not fake news. It is not okay. Whatever your politics, it is wrong to dismiss the damage to the norms and traditions that have guided the presidency and our public life for decades or, in many cases, since the republic was founded. It is also wrong to stand idly by, or worse, to stay silent when you know better, while a president brazenly seeks to undermine public confidence in law enforcement institutions that were established to keep our leaders in check.”

Comey writes that “we are experiencing dangerous times in our country, with a political environment where basic facts are disputed, fundamental truth is questioned, lying is normalized and unethical behavior is ignored, excused or rewarded.”

Comey compares Trump to a mafia don: “I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob. 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 of some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.”

Comey says Trump repeatedly brought up salacious details from the Trump-Russia dossier: In a January 2017 conversation, Trump said he hadn’t been involved with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel and was “asking — rhetorically, I assumed — whether he seemed like a guy who needed the service of prostitutes,” Comey writes.

“He then began discussing cases where women had accused him of sexual assault, a subject I had not raised,” Comey writes. “He mentioned a number of women, and seemed to have memorized their allegations.”

At a subsequent meeting, Trump said the allegation couldn’t be true because “I’m a germaphobe,” Comey writes, and said “there’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.”

Comey says John Kelly considered resigning after he was fired: Former Homeland Security Secretary and now Chief of Staff John Kelly called Comey after he was fired and said he “was sick” about it and “intended to quit in protest,” Comey writes.

“He (Kelly) said he didn’t want to work for dishonorable people who would treat someone like me in such a manner,” Comey writes. “I urged Kelly not to do that, arguing the country needed principled people around this president. Especially this president.”

Comey says he’s sorry he couldn’t explain things better to Clinton: Clinton and some of her supporters have blamed Comey for her loss in the 2016 presidential election after he announced two weeks before the vote that he was renewing his investigation into her use of the private email server. New emails had been discovered, he said at the time, and though no new information was discovered, Clinton’s poll numbers declined sharply.

“I have read she has felt anger toward me personally, and I’m sorry for that,” Comey writes. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do a better job explaining to her and her supporters why I made the decisions I made.”

Comey writes: “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. But I don’t know.”

Sources: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, The Hill, CNBC

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)