US President Donald Trump on Friday laced into former FBI director James Comey as an “untruthful slime ball” as the White House and the Republican Party mounted a withering counterattack against Comey and his stinging new memoir.
Comey is embarking on a publicity roll out of his book, A Higher Loyalty, which offers his version of the highly controversial events surrounding his firing by Trump and the Russia and former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton e-mail investigations.
In the book, Comey compares Trump to a mob boss demanding loyalty, suggests he is unfit to lead and mocks the US president’s appearance.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday stood at the White House podium 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 said: “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.”
Anticipating broad media attention for Comey as his book tour gets under way, Sanders scolded reporters in advance for preparing to “cover it endlessly, all day today, all day tomorrow, and my guess is every day next week with very little time given to the issues that people care about.”
Unlike Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which caught the White House unawares when it was published in January, the Trump 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 information and breaking his “sacred trust with the president of the United States, the dedicated agents of the FBI and the American people.”
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