President Donald Trump lashed out at former FBI Director James Comey on Friday after excerpts from Comey’s book began to circulate.
He slammed Comey as an “untruthful slime ball” and a “proven LEAKER & LIAR,” claiming Comey has lied to Congress under oath.
Comey’s memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, has yet to be released, but a few salacious passages have been made available that paint Trump in a less-than-flattering light.
According to Comey’s book, the president was obsessed with disproving the existence of the so-called “pee tape” ― the footage that supposedly shows Trump watching sex workers urinate in a Moscow hotel suite the Obamas had stayed in.
The “pee tape” allegation first surfaced in a dossier that British intelligence officer Christopher Steele compiled as opposition research about the Trump presidential campaign and its contacts with the Russians, and then shared with the FBI because of his concerns about the material.
Trump “strongly denied the allegations, asking — rhetorically, I assumed — whether he seemed like a guy who needed the service of prostitutes,” Comey writes in his memoir, according to The Washington Post and the New York Post.
Comey, who was leading the investigation into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russians, was fired last May. In another book excerpt obtained by Axios, Comey reportedly describes the infamous one-on-one dinner he had with Trump on Jan. 27, 2017. Trump buttered him up, Comey said, and then told him he could leave his post as FBI director if he wanted to ― although it would look bad.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story indicated Steele compiled his dossier on Trump for the FBI. In fact, he compiled it as opposition research and then shared it with the FBI.