RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former FBI Director James Comey said he was “very much” struck by disinterest within the Trump camp about the nature of Russia’s campaign influence operation and preventing the Kremlin from continuing to attack the United States.

Comey’s book A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership comes out Tuesday. It’s currently No. 1 on the Amazon best-seller list.

His first TV interview to accompany the book release — and his first TV interview since being fired last year by President Trump — will air Sunday at 10 p.m. EST on ABC.

The network aired excerpts with Comey and George Stephanopoulos this morning, in which the ABC host asked the former FBI chief about his first meeting with Trump on Jan. 6, 2017, at Trump Tower in New York.

“President-elect Trump’s first question was to confirm that it had no impact on the election. And then the conversation, to my surprise, moved into a P.R. conversation about how the Trump team would position this and what they could say about this. They actually started talking about drafting a press release with us still sitting there,” Comey said. “And the reason that was so striking to me is that that’s just not done; that the intelligence community does intelligence, the White House does P.R. and spin.”

“No one, to my recollection, asked, ‘So what’s coming next from the Russians? How might we stop it? What’s the future look like?,'” he added. “It was all, ‘What can we say about what they did and how it affects the election that we just had?'”

Comey met alone with Trump to discuss the sensitive details in of the Steele dossier, which in part alleges that Trump had a salacious encounter with prostitutes in Moscow in 2013.

“Called out to meet with a person who doesn’t know me, had just been elected president of the United States. By all accounts, and from my watching him during the campaign, could be volatile. And I’m about to talk to him about allegations that he was involved with prostitutes in Moscow, and that the Russians taped it and have leverage over him,” Comey recalled of the meeting.

Comey said he didn’t discuss the financing of the Steele dossier with Trump at the meeting; the research was first funded by GOP opponents of Trump during the primary season and then by Democrats. “It wasn’t necessary for my goal, which was to alert him that we had this information,” he said.

The former director said he got “as graphic as I needed to be” describing the dossier’s allegations.

“I started to tell him about the allegation was that he had been involved with prostitutes in a hotel in Moscow in 2013, during a visit for the Miss Universe Pageant, and that the Russians had filmed the episode,” Comey said. “And he interrupted very defensively and started talking about it, you know, ‘Do I look like a guy who needs hookers?’ And I assumed he was asking that rhetorically. I didn’t answer that, and then I just moved on, and — and explained, ‘Sir, I’m not saying that we credit this. I’m not saying we believe it. We just thought it very important that you know.’ …I never said ‘I don’t believe it,’ because I couldn’t say one way or another.”

Intelligence officials have said parts of the Steele dossier have been verified while other parts have not yet been verified. Comey said the raw intel describing a prostitute encounter was still unverified at the time he left the bureau.

Comey called the briefing “really weird — it was almost an out-of-body experience for me. I was floating above myself, looking down, saying, ‘You’re sitting here briefing the incoming president of the United States about prostitutes in Moscow.'”

In a private dinner with Trump at the White House on Jan. 27, 2017, Comey said Trump raised the topic again.

“He says he may want me to investigate it to prove that it didn’t happen, and then he says something that distracted me, because he said, ‘You know, if there’s even a 1 percent chance my wife thinks that’s true, that’s terrible,'” the former FBI director said. “And I remember thinking, ‘How could your wife think there’s a 1 percent chance you were with prostitutes, peeing on each other in Moscow?’ I’m a flawed human being, but there’s literally zero chance that my wife would think that was true. So what kind of marriage to what kind of man does your wife think there’s only a 99 percent chance you didn’t do that?”

Comey said Trump told him, “I may order you to investigate that.”

“I said, ‘Sir, that’s up to you, but you’d want to be careful about that, because it might create a narrative that we’re investigating you personally. And second, it’s very difficult to prove something didn’t happen,'” Comey said.

Asked if he believed Trump’s denial, Comey replied, “Honestly, never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible, but I don’t know.”

After the excerpt aired, Trump lashed out at Comey on Twitter: “James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did-until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH. He is a weak and untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI. His handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton case, and the events surrounding it, will go down as one of the worst ‘botch jobs’ of history. It was my great honor to fire James Comey!”

Comey last tweeted at Trump on St. Patrick’s Day: “Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Jim Comey deserves a special place in the annals of sanctimonious frauds in Washington, D.C. He leaked, lied, bent rules, treated FBI material as his own personal property, violated confidential conversations, and generally acted like a government unto himself. But now he has the gall to write it all up in the sonorous nonsense language of “constitutional crisis.” His forthcoming memoir amounts to nothing more than the sour grapes of a self-serving operator over a wholly justified sacking.

The media is already burbling over its fatuous contents. Ever the leaker, Comey tossed a pre-publication morsel of gossip from the book to the liberals at the Daily Beast — Comey’s claim that General Kelly commiserated with him over his “dishonorable” firing. The White House has denied the claim. So Comey is already cashing in on betrayed confidences, all while lecturing others about “loyalty” and probity.

What Comey calls “higher loyalty” is just adherence to the interests of an unaccountable ruling class and the needs of his own ego. Comey slithered out of the swamp and now plays the great conscience of Washington. He sighs, looks heavenward, quotes Reinhold Niebuhr, tries hard to look very thoughtful — only to relay low hearsay and peddle anti-Trump dreck. Who cares? Comey’s wounded ego is not a constitutional crisis. The scandal is not that he lost his exalted job but that such a pompous creep once held it.

To understand the depth of Comey’s leaking and lying, all you have to do is go back and look at his scummy maneuvering in response to Trump’s “wiretap” tweets. Those tweets turned out to be entirely accurate: The Obama administration was intercepting communications at Trump Tower, both during the campaign and the transition. Comey knew perfectly well that Trump was right — FBI agents had been sifting through the Trump Tower records of Carter Page and Paul Manafort — but he sent his team out to lie about Trump’s tweets anyways.

He had a story placed in the New York Times shortly after Trump’s tweets: “Comey Asks Justice Department to Reject Trump’s Wiretapping Claim.” It quoted Comey’s leakers, “senior American officials,” as saying that Trump’s assertion was “false” and that the FBI director had asked the Justice Department to refute it.

Early reports out the former FBI director’s book indicate a penchant for purple prose and navel-gazing only rivaled by his emo Twitter posts.

Michael Wolff, move over. Early reports out about former FBI Director James Comey’s book indicate a penchant for purple prose and navel-gazing only rivaled by the “A Higher Loyalty” author’s emo Twitter posts. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book a week early, and reports it contains gems like the following:

The 6-foot-8 Comey describes Trump as shorter than he expected with a ‘too long’ tie and ‘bright white half-moons’ under his eyes that he suggests came from tanning goggles. He also says he made a conscious effort to check the president’s hand size, saying it was ‘smaller than mine but did not seem unusually so.’

According to the AP, Comey’s book alleges this is how Trump repudiated opposition research allegations Trump had prostitutes urinate on a hotel bed the Obamas had used:

Trump said, ‘I’m a germaphobe. There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.’

Comey writes that Trump raised the issue again, unprompted, during their one-on-one dinner at the White House and it bothered the president that there might be even ‘a one percent chance’ his wife might think it was true.

Comey then registers surprise, writing that he thought to himself ‘why his wife would think there was any chance, even a small one, that he had been with prostitutes urinating on each other in a Moscow hotel room.”

Hmm, I don’t know, maybe because the salacious (and later thoroughly discredited) story was all over every media outlet in the country?

The Washington Post reports more hilariously overpsychologized book excerpts, like this one about Attorney General Jeff Sessions: “Sessions just cast his eyes down at the table, and they darted quickly back and forth, side to side. He said nothing. I read in his posture and face a message that he would not be able to help me.”

Is this “Twilight”? Weirdly backwards fan fiction?

Way back in July 1969, reporter Leo Damore covered Senator Edward Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick caper for the Cape Cod News. As he showed in his masterful Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up, everything Kennedy said about the incident was a lie.

Ted Kennedy rode his brother John’s coattails to win a seat from Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate in 1962. The next year, JFK was assassinated and brother Bobby fell to shooter Sirhan Sirhan in 1968. That led to speculation that Ted might be a contender for president by a simple process of family succession. For the full story, read The Kennedys: An American Drama, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.

In July 1969, Senator Kennedy came to Cape Cod for a regatta and stashed brother Bobby’s “boiler room girls,” in a cottage on Chappaquiddick Island. The film version of “Chappaquiddick” plays this covert hook-up like a ’60s beach flick with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello and viewers won’t spot a single navel. Ted (Jason Clarke) slips away from the drunken bash with the beautiful Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara). Viewers don’t see what’s going on in the black Oldsmobile, but it is possible to guess.

Spooked by a cop, Kennedy roars away and promptly drives off a bridge into Poucha Pond. The senator somehow gets out and one of his first thoughts is “I am not going to be president.” The senator leaves Mary Jo in the car, where she dies, and does not report the accident until the next day.

As the film shows in great detail, Ted deploys squads of heel-clicking sycophants to control the press, the police, the hearing, the medical examination, and the handling of Mary Jo’s body. He gets off with a tap on the wrist. Family scribe Ted Sorensen (Taylor Nichols) pens Kennedy’s explanatory television speech, which as another handler explains is “all bullshit.” At the funeral for Mary Jo, Joan Kennedy tells husband Ted, “go fuck yourself.” Viewers may agree, but this does not wrap the story.

“You will never be great,” family patriarch Joe Kennedy (Bruce Dern) tells Ted. As the film explains in text, Joe died four months later, and Ted went on to become the “lion” of the U.S. Senate. The takeaway is that the drunken control freak who left Mary Jo Kopechne to die did eventually become a great man. As Millennials should understand, even liberal Democrats of the time never thought Ted Kennedy was great.

In fact, it wasn’t even close.

Hugh Hewitt is a host with the Salem Radio Network, an MSNBC host and NBC News analyst, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a law professor at the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University.

We are going to have to wait a long time for anyone to approach Donald Trump with, say, the detachment and scholarship that Robert Caro has brought to his study of Lyndon Johnson. Caro published his first volume, “The Path to Power,” in 1982, nearly a decade after LBJ died, and about 35 years later the biographer is still at work, on a fifth volume. So it will be with Trump — as it is with all men and women who change history. We will have to wait until we get the end of the story and have access to all the primary sources. We also will need a biographer with the talent and dedication to find the “figure under the carpet,” as Leon Edel described the biographer’s task. The many Trump books along the way should be regarded more or less as source material. They should be graded on how useful they will be to the ultimate project, and of course on the trustworthiness of their contents.

[Ronald Kessler’s “The Secrets of the FBI”]

Ronald Kessler’s new book, “The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game,” is trustworthy, and, in an unusual twist these days, it’s favorable to the president. “Because of the liberal bias of the mainstream media,” Kessler writes in a poker tell as obvious as any ever seen, “many of Trump’s achievements are either underplayed or not reported at all.” Kessler doesn’t underplay them, and overstates some, but gets almost everything down — good and bad — of Season One of the Trump presidency. Among Trump’s triumphs, Kessler points to the two most significant: the seating of Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, and the massive tax cut and tax reform bill. Kessler also got Trump to sit down for an interview on New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago, a conversation that shows the president confident and comfortable in his role.

I checked with one of Kessler’s sources, who is quoted quite liberally, and discovered that indeed the source spent time with the author. The source hadn’t read the book yet but the voice he projects in the pages sounds right to me. Thus, Kessler’s note-taking or tape-recording seems reliable, which is an odd but increasingly necessary assessment to include in a book review, but we are in an era when facts and sources are sometimes elusive. Kessler’s book seems to me professional and ethical, a workmanlike, useful contribution to the accumulating pile of source material on this presidency (beginning of course with the tweets. All of them. Pity Trump’s Caro).
“The Trump White House,” by Ronald Kessler (Crown Forum)

Kessler, a former reporter for The Washington Post and a former chief Washington correspondent for the conservative news site Newsmax, has published 21 books. For this one, he interviewed the major players in the 2016-17 season: Reince Priebus, Stephen K. Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer and others. “The Trump White House” deserves a careful reading as a chronicle of what went on inside Trump World in 2017.

Announcements of scheduled appearances for the widely anticipated $850-to-attend book tour by fired FBI Director James Comey foreshadow a much-ballyhooed return to the public square. Media outlets eagerly booked the former director, and his opus, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” briefly jumped to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list.

But should Comey — a central witness in special counsel Robert Mueller probe — be making public his version of events which will certainly differ significantly with what President Trump, the central target in the special prosecutor’s probe, has repeatedly stated?

Comey was humiliatingly removed by the president last May and enjoyed a brief period of bipartisan sympathy for the disgraceful manner in which he was dispatched. The FBI’s seventh director learned of his termination via televised news reports while appearing before an FBI audience in Los Angeles. This is not the manner with which career public servants should ever be separated from service. Yet, with the current president, it has become de rigueur.

Initially taking the high road, remaining silent, professional and above the fray, Comey has now resorted to directly confronting the president at his own game. He shed his original anonymous Twitter nom de plume, “Reinhold Niebuhr,” and directly waded in to criticize and taunt his tormentor. In the immediate wake of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s firing and Trump’s Twitter gloating, Comey ominously warned, “Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.”

And, just like that, Comey conceded the tiny sliver of moral high ground he precariously clung to and reduced his position as an advocate of the pursuit of facts into a narcissistic quest to sell books. He unwittingly joined Trump in the pig-wallow that currently serves as civil discourse.