Courtesy of the
New York Times:
Donald J. Trump asked Director James B. Comey of the F.B.I. to investigate and knock down a lurid but unverified report that placed Mr. Trump years earlier in a Moscow hotel suite with prostitutes, explaining to Mr. Comey that the fantastic story was untrue and was painful and distressing to his wife, Melania Trump.
By Mr. Comey’s accounts, Mr. Trump, then the president-elect, disputed the so-called Steele dossier, a document compiled by a former British intelligence officer that detailed an allegation in which Mr. Trump watched prostitutes urinate on each other. Mr. Comey writes that Mr. Trump insisted that “there’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me” in part because he is a self-professed germophobe. “No way.”
Here was Comey's take on Trump's overall personality:
“This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values,” Mr. Comey writes in the book, saying his service to Mr. Trump recalled for him the days when he investigated the mob in New York. “The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. 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.”
Nothing startling about this revelation, we have all seen evidence of that ourselves.
Comey also makes a few other observations:
“His face appeared slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles,” Mr. Comey writes of his impressions during that first in-person session. He said Mr. Trump had “impressively coifed, bright blond hair, which upon close inspection looked to be all his.”
Comey also mentions that Trump is smaller in stature than he first thought, and had smallish hands.
He also writes that Trump builds a “a cocoon of alternative reality” around himself and those who serve him.
Much of the book is devoted to Comey's fear about how the Trump presidency is damaging the country:
“We are experiencing a dangerous time in our country,” he writes, “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 also touches on why he felt he had to announce that the Hillary Clinton email case was reopened only a little over a week before the election.
Courtesy of
The Hill:
Comey has said that he made the public announcement in part because he was concerned concealing the FBI's investigation would imply bias. However, in the book Comey acknowledges that he assumed at the time that Clinton would win the election.
“Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me,” he wrote of the assumption, according to ABC News. "It is entirely possible 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.”
So it appears that Comey was concerned about protecting the FBI's reputation, and felt that Clinton was far enough in the lead that his announcement would not change the outcome.
If only that had been true.
There were reports that the Trump team was coming up with a strategy to deal with Comey's book, but it appears that Trump himself went with "unhinged."
Trump might be right about that "botch jobs" comment as anything that might have helped to get HIM elected is likely going to be seen as a humongous mistake.
