Fired FBI Director James Comey says President Trump is morally unfit to be president, a statement that served as the final grenade launched during an hourlong assault on the Trump presidency and the forces that led to his election.
Comey’s interview Sunday night with ABC was the first in a long series of media hits he’ll do in the upcoming days promoting his book, A Higher Loyalty.
Perhaps the biggest verbal body slam delivered by Comey came in the interview’s waning moments, when he said he feels Trump isn’t fit to be president — but not due to any sort of medical condition.
“Yes. But not in the way I often hear people talk about it. I don’t buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or early stages of dementia. He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who’s tracking conversations and knows what’s going on. I don’t think he’s medically unfit to be president. I think he’s morally unfit to be president,” Comey said.
“A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds.”
When asked if he thinks Trump should be impeached, Comey said no — but he admitted it was for a strange reason.
“I hope not, because I think impeaching and removing Donald Trump from office would let the American people off the hook and have something happen indirectly that I believe they’re duty bound to do directly. People in this country need to stand up and go to the voting booth and vote their values,” Comey said.
The interview, in which Comey said he’s not sure if Trump is compromised by the Russians and couldn’t believe the president asked him to look into claims there is a video involving him and sex workers urinating on a Moscow bed, was a rundown of Comey’s book, which will be released Tuesday.
The meetings with Trump, especially to describe the allegations in the Steele dossier, were often bizarre affairs.
“I think as graphic as I needed to be. I did not go into the business about — people peeing on each other, I just thought it was a weird enough experience for me to be talking to the incoming president of the United States about prostitutes in a hotel in Moscow,” Comey said, when asked how graphic he was in the briefings. “And so I left that part out. I thought I’d given enough to put him on notice as to what the essence of the material was.”
He said Trump immediately got defensive.
“He was very defensive and started to launch into — for reasons that I don’t understand, started going into the list of people who had accused him of touching them improperly, sexual assault and how he hadn’t done this, he hadn’t done that, he hadn’t done that,” Comey said.
“And I worried the conversation was about to crash, because I was reading that he was reacting like, ‘We’re investigating you and we’re going to go figure out whether you were with prostitutes in Moscow.’ And — and so I said something in substance about how we don’t — it — ‘We’re not investigating you, sir. This is not something that we’re — we care about, except that you know that this is out there.’”
In the interview, Comey said he often felt like meeting with Trump meant he had to be on top of his game because he figured the president would lie.
“Yes, yeah. I — and I — and I had, obviously, concerns about that earlier, having watched him on the campaign that he is someone who is — for whom the truth is not a high value. And — and obviously, there were examples of that in the dinner,” Comey said when asked if he was thinking about Trump being a liar during his meetings.
Comey detailed some of his meetings with Trump during his short time working in the president’s administration, including one dinner in which Trump reportedly asked him for loyalty.
The former FBI director said he regretted his actions that night because he tried to escape an awkward conversation — eventually telling Trump the president would always get “honest loyalty” from him — instead of making a point about government norms.
“I should’ve given that whole speech then. But in the moment, frankly, it didn’t occur to me. And I — maybe I didn’t have the guts to do it. I wanted to get out of this conversation without compromising myself,” Comey said. “And I felt like, given all I’ve told him already, he has to understand what I mean by honest loyalty and he’s kidding himself if he thinks I just promised that I’m — I’m ‘amica nostra.’ But — in hindsight, you’re probably right. I probably should have done it differently.”
Comey said earlier in the interview Trump’s presidency will be an unprecedented assault on American governmental norms. It’s up to the country to pull through it, he said.
And, Comey believes the country will.
“The strength of this country is that we’re going to outlast it. That there will be damage to that norm. But I liken President Trump in the book to a forest fire. Going to do tremendous damage. Going to damage those important norms. But a forest fire gives healthy things a chance to grow that had no chance before that fire,” he said.
