Former FBI Director James Comey criticized President Trump in the Oval Office for comparing American democracy with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stranglehold of power, according to his forthcoming memoir.
In his book, Comey recounts an impromptu White House meeting with Trump in which Comey stops Trump while the president is praising himself for a response he gave to Bill O’Reilly during an interview for the 2017 Super Bowl L1 pregame show.
O’Reilly had asked the president whether he “respected” Putin, despite Putin being a “killer.”
Trump told O’Reilly he did “respect” Putin, but that didn’t mean he was “going to get along with him.”
“We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent,” Trump replied.
“I jumped on it and did something I might never have done as a younger person – especially to a president of the United States. Something I’d never seen anyone else do around Trump in the limited interactions I’d had with him… I interrupted his monologue,” Comey writes in “A Higher Loyalty.”
“‘The first part of your answer was fine, Mr. President,’ I said, as he took a breath and looked at me with a blank expression. ‘But not the second part. We aren’t the kind of killers that Putin is,'” Comey continues.
Comey then describes how Trump’s “eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened,” like “someone who wasn’t used to being challenged or corrected by those around him.”
“And just as quickly as the glower crossed his face, it was gone. “It was if I had not spoken, and had never been born. The meeting was done,” Comey adds.
Comey explains how the conversation transpired after he visited the West Wing to talk with then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus about establishing more traditional relations between the Trump administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI.
Instead, Comey found himself shaken by the experience.
“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.”
Comey will give his first interview since he was fired by Trump in May on Sunday ahead of the memoir’s official release Tuesday.
