Jim Comey's book, "A Higher Loyalty", is scheduled for release on Monday ~ some media commentators received advance copies and are reporting on the book ~ the DiC is lashing out in every direction ~ here's a sampling ~ some "live links" in original ~ Sooz

‘LEAKER & LIAR’: Trump calls for Comey to be prosecuted in furious morning tweet
Brad Reed / 13 Apr 2018 at 08:04 ET

President Donald Trump has lashed out at former FBI Director James Comey on Friday morning in an angry tweet storm.

“James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR,” Trump wrote. “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.”


In fact, Comey did not leak classified information, but rather leaked out a memo that he wrote about his interactions with Trump in which Trump asked the former FBI director for his personal loyalty. As the Washington Post explains, this specific memo contained no classified material.

After calling for his own former FBI director to be prosecuted, Trump continued attacking Comey in very personal terms.

“He is a weak and untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI,” Trump wrote. “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 has been on TV promoting his new book, “A Higher Loyalty,” which is scheduled to be released on April 17.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/leaker-liar-trump-calls-comey-prosecuted-furious-morning-tweet/

Leaks? Really, Donald? Please specify which bits are leaks. After all, if they're leaks they aren't lies.

And his base starts chanting "Lock her up! Lock her up!"
Another great day for the Orange Zampano.

While some R's are criticising Comey's book as being too vindictive, I love....love.....love this quote from an R in this article. Amen.

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/ ... li=AAggNb9

"There's no low blows when it comes to this president," said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). "He's lowered the bar so far that he doesn't deserve the same amount of respect that other presidents have in the past. So I'm not going to criticize somebody for not holding back."

PSSSSST, roseanne ~ the quote you [and I] love is from a "D", not an "R" ~

Sooz

I wasn't happy with Comey's timing in renewing the Hillary emails investigation so close to the election ... but in ANY honesty/ethics contest between Comey and the DiC, Comey wins ~ and for all of the DiC's blustering about the Comey book, the DiC is only increasing public interest in it ~ I will definitely watch the 20/20 special tonight ~ ~ some "live links" in original ~ Sooz

Mike Allen 1 hour ago
The FBI's revenge

Back in December, President Trump tweeted: "After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness."

The state of play: Now, the FBI is getting its revenge. All at once, Trump is being pounded by the bureau and its alumni, with a three-pronged threat.

• The broadest narrative comes from fired FBI director James Comey, who concludes his piercing, detailed attacks in "A Higher Loyalty," out Tuesday: "There is reason to believe this fire will leave the presidency weaker and Congress and the courts stronger, just as the forest fire of Watergate did." On Monday, Comey spent nearly five hours with ABC's George Stephanopoulos (airing at 10 tonight as a "20/20" special). Sources familiar with the Comey interview say ABC has held back some of his strongest news-making bites. A source present at the taping said Comey's comments will "shock the president and his team" and "add more meat to the charges swirling around Trump."

• The clearest and most immediate threat, in the view of some White House aides, comes from the New York feds' investigation into Trump's longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who joined the Trump Organization in 2006. Trump advisers worry Cohen could serve as a Rosetta stone to the past decade of Trump's high-wire business dealings. The raid on Cohen's office has rattled Trump like no previous twist in the investigation.

• Robert Mueller's investigation has the potential to yield embarrassing revelations about Trump's campaign, transition and presidency, whether clumsy shortcuts or something more. Trump lawyers say the White House turned over more than 20,000 pages of documents, and the campaign provided more than 1.4 million.

Why it matters: As Trump confronts complex international eruptions and prepares for a summit with North Korea, the FBI clearly has taken up residence in his head.

• The Twitter rants were nothing compared with his on-camera blast at the federal investigators on Monday: Trump used "disgrace" seven times and "disgraceful" twice, and called the FBI raid on Cohen's office and hotel room (Trump said the agents "broke into the office") "an attack on our country, in a true sense. It's an attack on what we all stand for."

Be smart: The intelligence community, which Trump has also taunted and maligned, could still harbor surprises for a flummoxed president.

• One outside ally of the White House told me: "He picked fights with the two institutions that have the ability to find information people want hidden — a serious miscalculation about the relative power arrangements of the pieces of the executive branch."

P.S. To give you a sense of the tack Comey will take on the book tour ahead, he dedicates the book to "my former colleagues, the career people of the Department of Justice and the FBI, whose lasting commitment to truth keeps our country great."

• Comey: "We are experiencing a dangerous time in our country, with a political environment where basic facts are disputed, fundamental truth is questioned, lying is normalized, and unethical behavior is ignored, excused, or rewarded."

https://www.axios.com/fbi-trump-cohen-comey-revenge-investigation-b510fca0-d023-4755-9169-5d336aeeef8a.html

And yet - his poll numbers are way up. It seems many dislike him personally with a high disapproval rating, but think he is doing a good job otherwise - go figure. I have lost total faith that common decency, reasoning, empathy, prevail anymore or are prominent factors in Americans anymore.

Anyone else watch Jim Comey on 20/20 last night? ~ George Stephanopoulos' questions held Comey's feet to the fire ~ personally, I thought Comey did a credible job of explaining his own mindset and decisions at varying points prior to him being fired ~

ABC published a full transcript of the interview [including video snippets] at Transcript: James Comey's interview with ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos ~

Sooz

There aren't very many good interviewers around.

A good sum-up ~ the quotes below have "live links" to short videos of Comey's comments ~ Sooz

Axios 13 hours ago
James Comey to ABC: Trump is a serial liar, should be voted out of office

In an exclusive interview with ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on "20/20" tonight, former FBI director James Comey said that Trump is "morally unfit to be president" and that the American public was "duty bound" to vote him out of office in 2020.

His key line: “You cannot have, as president of the United States, someone who does not reflect the values that I believe Republicans treasure and Democrats treasure and independents treasure. That is the core of this country. That’s our foundation. And so impeachment, in a way, would short-circuit that.”

More hot quotes from Comey in the ABC interview, some first obtained by the NYT:

• On impeaching Trump: "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."

• On Charlottesville: "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."

• On Trump's intelligence: "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."

• On the most salacious allegations in the Steele dossier: "I 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."

• On investigating Hillary Clinton's emails: "Of course, at the time, I had no idea that I could make both halves angry at us, but we'll come to that later. But the deputy director who was a great deputy director and a longtime special agent, looked at me and said, 'You know you're totally screwed, right?' And I smiled. And I said, 'Yup. Nobody gets out alive.'

• On his comment that Clinton exercised "extreme carelessness:" "I wasn't trying to go easy on her or hard on her. I was trying to be honest and clear with the American people. What she did was really sloppy."

• On Trump's reluctance to criticize Vladimir Putin: "I can understand the arguments why the president of the United States might not want to criticize the leader of another country...But you would think that in private-- talking to the F.B.I. director, whose job it is to thwart Russian attacks, you might acknowledge that this enemy of ours is an enemy of ours. But I never saw. And so I don't know the reason. I really don't."

• On his plane-ride home after being fired from the FBI: "I took a bottle of red wine out of my suitcase that I was bringing back from California, a California pinot noir, and I drank red wine from a paper coffee cup...And then I-- as-- we got close to the airport in Washington, I asked the pilots could I sit up with them, 'cause I'd never done it...And-- and then we shook hands with tears in our eyes and then I left and get driven home."

• On possible obstruction of justice: "I woke up in the middle of the night and the thought hit me like a lightening bold, like, 'Wait a minute. If there are tapes, he will be heard on that tape in the Oval Office asking me to let it go. There is corroboration or could be corroboration for the thing we thought we'll never be able to corroborate...'Of possible obstruction of justice. Somebody's gotta go get those tapes."

https://www.axios.com/james-comey-abc-interview-trump-serial-liar-5b4f86e5-18d2-4939-9fa5-1ab35cf0eb5e.html

If you've got 30+minutes, I encourage you to watch the video live-linked below ~ Jim Comey is what I call a "true conservative" ... but with a sense of humor ~ he did a good job of humanizing himself with Stephen Colbert last night ~ Sooz

James Comey gets to laugh about Donald Trump on Stephen Colbert
“I’m out there living my best life. He wakes up in the morning and tweets at me.”
Charlie May • 04.18.2018 • 8:02 AM

When late-night host Stephen Colbert sat down with former FBI Director James Comey on "The Late Show" Tuesday night, he naturally asked him for one thing: devout loyalty.

Colbert's joke was met with a long and blank stare from Comey until the late-night host poured up a glass of Pinot Noir red wine into paper cups, a nod to what Comey drank on his private flight home after he was fired by President Donald Trump.

"I thought maybe we could recreate that happy moment for you right now," Colbert said as he prepared the toast. "To the truth."

It was the former FBI head's first late-night appearance, and while he was there to promote his new tell-all "A Higher Loyalty" it wasn't long before he began cracking some jokes of his own. Colbert asked him about the relentless insults Trump has hurled at him on Twitter, and if he had any rebuttal.

"In the last few days, he has called you 'Slippery Jim,' and he has called you a slimeball," Colbert noted. "Anything to say back?"

"No. He’s tweeted at me probably 50 times. I’ve been gone for a year. I’m like a breakup he can’t get over," Comey replied as the crowd roared. "I’m out there living my best life. He wakes up in the morning and tweets at me."

Becoming more serious, Comey explained the importance of not normalizing Trump's infamous Twitter tirades.

"Does that mean we’ve become numb to this? It’s not OK for the president of the United States to say a private citizen should be in jail," he said. "It’s not normal, it’s not acceptable, it’s not OK But it’s happened so much, there’s a danger we’re now numb to it, and the norm has been destroyed. And I feel that norm destroying in my own shrug. So we can’t allow that to happen. We have to talk about it and call it out. It’s not OK."

Over the course of the 30-minute interview, Comey offered some public assurances of special counsel Robert Mueller's job, and more importantly, the overall investigation he's leading into alleged Trump campaign ties to the Russian government.

"I think most likely it goes on. I think you would need to fire everyone in the Justice Department and the FBI to stop that investigation," Comey said when asked what he thought would happen if Mueller and deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were fired. "I could imagine U.S. attorney's offices picking it up, FBI field offices picking it up. I think it would be very hard to shut that down by firing."

Colbert also pressed Comey quite a bit on his decision to speak out about the FBI investigation into her use of a private email and serve when she was secretary of state.

"What was the consideration to sending a letter to Congress saying you were reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails after Anthony Weiner’s laptop was found to have 100,000 emails on it?" Colbert asked. Again, the norm and the standard was that the FBI does not discuss anything having to do with a political campaign 60 days out from the election."

But Comey shot down that so-called 60-day norm. "That’s not true — the 60-day thing, I don’t know where that comes from."

He added, "You take no action, if you can avoid it, that might have an impact on any election."

Colbert shot back, "Well, you had to imagine this would have an effect."

The two went on to debate back and forth over Comey's decision to speak out just 11 days before the election, but eventually moved on as Colbert wanted to address the salacious allegations in the Steele dossier.

"How did you tell him that there was a — and I want to put this delicately — pee-pee tape?" Colbert asked.

"I spoke about information, unverified, that related to an allegation that he was with prostitutes in a hotel in Moscow, and that the Russians had videotaped it," Comey answered. "I didn’t go into the rest of it."

"So you didn’t mention the salacious detail of the two prostitutes getting up on the bed that the Obamas had stayed in — because it was the presidential suite — and, you know, engaging in some water play?" Colbert asked.

Comey, consistent with his recent interview with ABC New on Sunday, confirmed he did not get too explicit and told Colbert that the president denied all of the allegations profusely.

However, Colbert couldn't help himself but mentioned that he actually rented the room used by Trump when he traveled to Moscow last summer.

"Would you like to ask me anything about that room?" Colbert said to Comey.

Comey asked, "Is it big enough for a germaphobe to be at a safe distance from the activity?"

"The bedroom is very long," Colbert quipped. "You’d definitely be out of what we call at Sea World, the splash zone."

[Video accessible via the end link or at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... -nGPNn19vE]

https://www.salon.com/2018/04/18/james-comey-gets-to-laugh-about-donald-trump-on-stephen-colbert/