Donald Trump resumed a full-throated attack on James Comey, hours before the FBI director he fired in May will appear in a network television interview ahead of the release of a book that describes the president in unfavorable terms.
“I never asked Comey for Personal Loyalty. I hardly even knew this guy. Just another of his many lies. His ‘memos’ are self serving and FAKE!” Trump said on Twitter early Sunday, one of five Comey-related tweets of the morning.
“Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!” Trump also said in what so far has been the final tweet.
Trump’s tweet storm comes ahead of a highly anticipated interview with Comey on ABC News to be broadcast on Sunday night. Comey will discuss his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” which is scheduled for release on Tuesday.
Comey, who ran the Federal Bureau of Investigations for almost four years, portrays the president in the book as a liar, dumb and rude, and he compares elements of Trump’s behavior to that of a Mafia boss.
‘Uncomfortable’ Dinner
The thought of having dinner alone with Trump at the White House made Comey “deeply uncomfortable,” he writes in the book, because he feared that the president wanted to compromise the FBI’s integrity and independence and was waging “an effort to establish a patronage relationship” with him.
The Republican National Committee has started an effort to discredit Comey on social media, in digital advertising, and through a website, lyincomey.com, ahead of the release of the book.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Friday that Comey has a “credibility problem” and that firing him will go down as one of Trump’s greatest achievements. Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week,” she said it was clear that Comey was a “leaker” by his own admission and “there is such a huge bipartisan consensus that James Comey doesn’t have credibility and shouldn’t have been leading the FBI any longer.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan said Sunday that Comey is a man of integrity “as far as I know,” while adding that “I don’t know the guy.”
Asked whether Comey is someone he would describe as a slime ball -- a term Trump has used twice in tweets this week -- Ryan said in an interview broadcast Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “I don’t speak like that. I don’t use words like that.”
In other tweets on Sunday, Trump bemoaned what he termed the end of attorney-client privilege after a raid on the office of his personal lawyer, and he criticized the media for seizing on his use of the term “mission accomplished” to describe Friday night’s air strikes on Syria.
“The Syrian raid was so perfectly carried out, with such precision, that the only way the Fake News Media could demean was by my use of the term ‘Mission Accomplished,”’ Trump said on Twitter. “I knew they would seize on this but felt it is such a great Military term, it should be brought back. Use often!”
