Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said on Sunday that Donald Trump was unfit to be the president of the United States. Comey, who Trump fired as the FBI director in May 2017, said the president was “morally unfit” to lead the US.
“I don’t buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or in the early stages of dementia,” Comey said during a promotional interview for his upcoming book, A Higher Loyalty, with ABC News. “He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who’s tracking conversations and knows what’s going on. I don’t think he’s medically unfit to be president. I think he’s morally unfit to be president.”
The former chief of the federal agency said that 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”, did not deserve to be the US president.
Comey also described the meeting he had in Trump Tower, when he briefed the president-elect about an unverified intelligence document compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which alleged, among other things, that Trump had been in a Moscow hotel in 2013 with two prostitutes. Comey told Trump that the Russians may have been filming him.
“I did not go into the business about people urinating on each other,” the former FBI director told ABC News. “I just thought it was weird [to have this discussion with the president-elect].” Comey said the Russian government may have some information on Trump, which could be used to blackmail him.
The former FBI officer said Trump may have obstructed justice during the investigation into his role in the alleged meddling of the Russian government in the 2016 United States elections. But if the president fired Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is handling the inquiry, it would “set off alarm bells that this is his most serious attack yet on the rule of law.”
Comey had said after his firing that the president had pressured him in various ways to drop the inquiry into Trump’s election campaign team’s ties to Russia. Trump had then accused Comey of lying.
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