President Trump seemed to be trying to integrate government officials into his circle in the same way a mob boss cultivates his supporters, James Comey said Sunday.
In an interview on ABC, Comey said his first meeting with Trump in Trump Tower reminded him of meeting Mafia bosses during his time as a US attorney in Manhattan.
“And I think the reason it was coming into my head was I felt this effort to make us all — and maybe this wasn’t their intention, but it’s the way it felt to me, to make us all ‘amica nostra,’” Comey said. “We’re all part of the messaging, we’re all part of the effort. The boss is at the head of the table and we’re going to figure out together how to do this. And I think that’s why it brought that strange memory back into my head.”
Comey’s statement echoes his book, A Higher Loyalty, which comes out on Tuesday.
In the book, Comey said he challenged Trump on an answer he gave in an interview that compared the U.S. to the Russian government. In that answer, Trump drew a moral relativism between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policies toward dissidents and American “killers.”
“I had never seen anything like it in the Oval Office. As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the mob,” Comey writes. “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.”
