If there was any chance that President Trump and James B. Comey could avoid all-out war, it will end Sunday night.
That is when ABC News will broadcast an hourlong interview with Mr. Comey, the president’s fired F.B.I. director, as he seeks to publicize his searing tell-all memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.”
.. He calls Mr. Trump unethical and says he is a serial liar who could be vulnerable to blackmail by the Russian government. He compares the president to a mafia boss and says his tenure has been like a forest fire that is incinerating the country’s important norms and traditions.
“Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation,” Mr. Comey writes in the book.
The interview with Mr. Comey and the weekslong media blitz he plans for his book amount to a remarkable public assault on a sitting president by someone who served at the highest levels of power in the government.
.. Mr. Trump’s legal fate, as well as his political fortunes in Washington, may depend on whether he succeeds in undermining the credibility of Mr. Comey and the law enforcement institutions he views as arrayed against him.
.. Mr. Comey’s liberation is all the more combustible because it is aimed directly at a president who has said with pride on Twitter that “when someone attacks me, I always attack back…except 100x more.”
.. Mr. Trump called Mr. Comey a “slimeball” for the second time in three days, saying in a pair of early-morning tweets that he belongs in jail for what the president said were lies to Congress and leaks of classified information.
.. It is unclear where the epic battle of wills will lead, other than to a sustained escalation of insults between two men who have each admitted to having outsize egos.
.. It is unclear where the epic battle of wills will lead, other than to a sustained escalation of insults between two men who have each admitted to having outsize egos.
.. Mr. Comey says in the interview that Mr. Trump and his aides seemed interested only in what the former F.B.I. director called the “P.R. and spin” about the issue.
“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,” Mr. Comey said in a preview of the interview that aired on Sunday morning. “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?’”
.. Mr. Comey said the president also raised the idea that the F.B.I. should investigate the claim as a way of proving that it never happened. Mr. Comey said he warned Mr. Trump that doing so would add to “the narrative” that the president was under investigation.
.. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, unloaded on Mr. Comey, calling him a “self-admitted leaker” and a liar.