Fired FBI Director James Comey promoted his upcoming book, A Higher Loyalty, with an exclusive interview with ABC News Thursday.
Comey used the interview with George Stephanopoulos to unleash a series of critiques of the man who fired him, President Donald Trump, but also mentioned a heretofore untold scandal involving Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
“Comey writes that he felt obligated to take more of a personal role as the public face of the investigation rather than deferring to then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch,” ABC News writes about his investigation of Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized private email server, “in part because of something involving Lynch that he cryptically refers to as a ‘development still unknown to the American public to this day.’” (emphasis added)
The article goes on to quote Comey’s book and its description of this “development”:
In early 2016, the U.S. government became aware of information from a classified source, and “the source and content of that material remains classified as I write this,” according to the book.
“Had it become public, the unverified material would undoubtedly have been used by political opponents to cast serious doubt on the attorney general’s independence in connection with the Clinton investigation,” Comey writes, without further elaboration.
Comey asserts that he didn’t sense Lynch interfered with the investigation, even after the highly publicized Phoenix tarmac meeting between Lynch and former President Bill Clinton. That episode convinced Comey that he needed to step forward with his own public accounting of the email server investigation. (emphasis added)
Much of the interview was devoted, as A Higher Loyalty presumably is, to attacks on President Trump. For example, the dismissed FBI Director compares Trump to a prominent Mafia crime boss because Trump asked him for “honest loyalty.” “The demand was like Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony,” Comey writes in his hotly anticipated book.
Elsewhere in the book, Comey writes that Trump asked him emphatically to investigate and prove to be false the infamous “pee tape” section of the still-unverified “Steele Dossier” that involved Trump allegedly ordering Russian prostitutes to urinate on each other. According to The Hill, Comey writes that Trump was concerned that his wife Melania would believe there was even a “one percent” chance the allegations are true. “In what kind of marriage, to what kind of man, does a spouse conclude there is only a 99 percent chance her husband didn’t do that?” The Hill quotes the book.
The Republican Party has already reacted to Comey’s book by unveiling a new campaign suggesting Comey is a liar. The Party, for example, launched LyinComey.com to counter the allegations in A Higher Loyalty as Comey prepares for his nationwide book tour. The official GOP Twitter account followed up with a steady stream of Comey hits:
The RNC pushback continued into Friday, often referencing the sustained attacks Democrats waged against Comey when he was being blamed for improper handling of the Clinton email investigation: