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Ralph Alswang/ABC News
When President Trump fired James B. Comey as the director of the F.B.I. last May, that did not mean the end of Mr. Comey’s time in the public eye — far from it. His memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” is about to be released and Mr. Comey is featured in a wide-ranging interview with ABC News that is set to air on Sunday at 10 p.m. Eastern.
ABC is airing one hour of its conversation with Mr. Comey, it conducted a five-hour interview with him, a transcript of which was obtained by The New York Times. In it, Mr. Comey called Mr. Trump a serial liar who treated women like “meat,” and described him as a “stain” on everyone who worked for him.
[Read more from The Times’s Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker and read annotated excerpts from the interview »]
An escalating feud
For days, Mr. Trump has waged a ferocious counterattack against Mr. Comey, who portrays the president in his book as an unethical and dishonest leader. On Sunday morning, Mr. Trump unleashed a barrage of Twitter posts, calling Mr. Comey a liar and denying he had asked him for loyalty.
I never asked Comey for Personal Loyalty. I hardly even knew this guy. Just another of his many lies. His “memos” are self serving and FAKE!
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Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
April 15, 2018
Mr. Trump suggested Mr. Comey should be jailed, accusing him of leaking classified information and lying to Congress. He referred to the Clinton email investigation, saying Mr. Comey “was making decisions based on the fact that he thought she was going to win, and he wanted a job.” He also called Mr. Comey a “slimeball” again, and said he had thrown the former attorney general, Loretta Lynch, “under the bus.”
Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!
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Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
April 15, 2018
Here is an overview of The New York Times’s coverage of Mr. Comey, who earned a reputation for being fastidiously nonpartisan yet has found himself, repeatedly, at the center of some of Washington’s fiercest political storms.
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
A letter to Congress, weeks before the election
Mr. Comey made a fateful decision in October 2016, when he was the F.B.I. director. In a letter that was immediately made public (you can read it here), he told Congress the agency was reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
