Trump Calls Comey ‘Untruthful Slime Ball’ as Book Details Released

WASHINGTON — James Comey’s searing tell-all book was met with an aggressive counterattack on his character by President Donald Trump and his allies on Friday, even as many Democrats struggled with conflicted feelings about the man they blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election.

In the book, Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director in May, describes the president as “unethical, and untethered to truth,” and writes that he often wondered about Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s attempt to influence the election. “Maybe it was a contrarian streak,” he wrote, “or maybe it was something more complicated that explained his constant equivocation and apologies for Vladimir Putin.” He also compares the president to a Mafia boss.

Pointed details from the book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” leaked out Thursday night before its official release Tuesday. The response from the president was personal and vicious, even by Trump’s standards.

In two early-morning tweets, the president called the former FBI director an “untruthful slime ball” and a “proven LEAKER & LIAR.” Trump said that it was his “great honor to fire” Comey.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, escalated the criticism later in the day, saying Comey will “be forever known as a disgraced partisan hack that broke his sacred trust with the president of the United States.”

The Republican National Committee joined in with an all-hands effort to discredit Comey by distributing lengthy talking points to conservative pundits, sympathetic media hosts and Republican lawmakers.

The message was coordinated with the White House’s and echoes Trump’s. “Comey is a liar and a leaker, and his misconduct led both Republicans and Democrats to call for his firing,” said Ronna McDaniel, the committee chairwoman.

The talking points describe Comey as a “disgraced former official” and a “consummate Washington insider who knows how to work the media to protect his flanks.” It says that Comey was “strongly criticized by members of both parties for his history of bizarre decisions, contradictory statements and acting against Department of Justice and FBI protocol.”

The committee created a “Lyin’ Comey” website and sent out mass emails to reporters litigating the claims in his book and interviews.

Foreshadowing the attack Trump delivered Friday, the committee’s talking points branded Comey as a leaker consumed with grievances against Trump and listed Comey-bashing quotes from Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the current Democratic leaders in the House and Senate.

Comey will have an opportunity to respond to his critics during a book tour that will take him to venues across the country. His first major interview, with ABC News, is scheduled to be broadcast Sunday night, though the network began airing clips Friday morning after the book leaked out.

He will have several other high-profile appearances in Washington, followed by events at bookstores in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles and other cities. At each, Comey’s observations about the president’s behavior and character are certain to generate headlines.

The Republican National Committee is organizing television and radio bookings for people appearing to rebut Comey during the tour. Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s most loyal advisers, was up early Friday to question Comey’s credibility for the TV cameras.

“We find that Mr. Comey has a revisionist view of history and seems like a disgruntled ex-employee,” Conway said. “After all, he was fired.”

Fox News, the president’s preferred TV news network, plans to air its own special on Sunday night, “The Trial of James Comey,” at 9 p.m. on “The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton.”

Republicans on Friday also leapt at the chance to tie Comey to Andrew G. McCabe, his former deputy director, after the Justice Department inspector general issued a highly critical report that accused McCabe of repeatedly misleading investigators.

Not all of the personal insults were coming from the president and his allies. At times, Comey seemed to be doing the same thing in his book, writing at one point that Trump’s face appeared “slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles.”

Comey’s comparison of the president’s operating style to the Mafia — “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” — might have been expected to please Democrats if it had come from someone else. But at least initially, he received a somewhat muted defense from Democrats still angry about the way he handled the investigation into Clinton’s private email server.

While they cheered on his fight with Trump, they argued that Comey should not have made public the email inquiry the way he did.

“He let his own ego get in the way, and it put him in charge of fate that was not his decision to act on,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a senior adviser to Clinton’s campaign. “I don’t think he had partisan motivations. But there’s a lot of people I know who don’t agree with me on that.”

Anger from Democrats toward Comey cascaded across social media on Friday. Palmieri said she would urge them not to join Trump in piling on Comey, even though she admitted there is “a lot of resentment” toward him.

“I don’t agree that he’s an untruthful slimeball,” she said, adding that Democrats should not help the president undermine Comey’s credibility. “That’s not responsible or productive.” Trump’s decision to fire Comey in May 2017 eventually led to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia’s 2016 election meddling and whether Trump has deliberately tried to obstruct the investigation. In an extraordinary day of testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee the next month, he foreshadowed many of the themes of his book, describing how Trump had tried to derail an investigation of Michael Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser and accused the president of lying and defaming him and the FBI.

The former FBI chief’s much-anticipated 304-page memoir is the first major memoir by one of the key characters in the Trump administration.

Some of the moments that Comey describes in the book were already publicly known: He describes a January 2017 dinner where he said that Trump asked him for a loyalty pledge, an episode that was reported by multiple news organizations last year. But the details cast Trump and his aides in a negative light.

The time Comey first briefed Trump on Russian election meddling has also been frequently described. In the book, Comey added his own description of how a discussion about a grievous intrusion into the American election process became “a strategy session about messaging on Russia — about how they could spin what we’d just told them.”