President Donald Trump is said to be fuming about the book, and White House aides are angry over what they see as James Comey’s unnecessarily personal jabs at the president. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo ‘The possibility of Trump exploding has gone up’ The former FBI director’s tell-all book surprised some West Wing aides with its jabs at Trump’s hand size and its talk of the ‘pee tape.’

President Donald Trump decided to skip an international summit to stay close to home amid a swirling debate about launching airstrikes in Syria — but instead spent Friday tweeting angrily about former senior FBI officials.

“He LIED! LIED! LIED!” Trump wrote of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, a career official who was fired hours before his official retirement in March amid an ongoing inspector-general review.


Trump went on to attack former FBI director James Comey and the broader Russia probe Comey once oversaw: “McCabe was totally controlled by Comey - McCabe is Comey!! No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”

The presidential missives were triggered by the release of a Justice Department inspector general report to the Hill critical of McCabe’s conduct. The report seemed only to further irritate the already amped-up president, who began the day tweeting about Comey, calling the longtime civil servant “a weak and untruthful slime ball.”

Trump also issued a surprise pardon to former top George W. Bush aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted more than a decade ago of perjury. The pardon was widely viewed as a whack at Comey, whose forthcoming bombshell tell-all memoir has dominated the news.

The White House still faces the unresolved situation in Syria. National security officials continued to meet Friday, and Trump discussed it with allies such as French President Emanuel Macron. Trump is also scheduled to meet next week with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to discuss his proposed summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

But the West Wing has been consumed by the myriad investigations aimed at the president and his closest allies.

Also on Friday, lawyers for Trump and his longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen were in federal court in Manhattan arguing that FBI investigators went too far by raiding Cohen’s Park Avenue apartment and Rockefeller Center office earlier this week, seizing documents and devices.

Federal prosecutors wrote in court filings that Cohen, who arranged a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election to cover up an alleged affair with Trump, is under criminal investigation.

The Wall Street Journal separately reported that Cohen negotiated a $1.6 million payment to a Playboy Playmate who said she was impregnated by prominent Los Angeles investor Elliott Broidy, an active Republican fundraiser. Broidy stepped down Friday as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee.

Yet the main preoccupation of the president and the people closest to him remained Comey. The White House offensive is only expected to intensify in the coming days as the former FBI director embarks on a series of media interviews ahead of the book's Tuesday release.

White House officials were scouring news reports and reaching out to allies who have copies of the book, hoping to identify passages that they believe undercut Comey’s credibility or make him seem sympathetic to Democrats.

Trump’s allies are keen to avoid a repeat of the fallout from Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” the hard-edged insider account of life in Trump’s White House that caught many in the West Wing by surprise and dominated headlines for weeks.

But so far, the White House’s strategy, or lack thereof, is doing little to stop the barrage of news stories about the book.

Over the past 24 hours, a steady stream of embarrassing details from the book has emerged, including that chief of staff John Kelly allegedly called Trump “dishonorable” for firing Comey and that the president urged Comey to investigate unsubstantiated rumors that he was secretly filmed with prostitutes urinating in front of him in a Moscow hotel room. The New York Daily News pounced on the latter revelation with a front-page headline that read, “Pee Brain.”

The White House press shop originally had assumed the Comey book would relitigate the former FBI director’s past testimony and statements, just repackaged into a different form, said one former White House official and one Republican close to the administration.

The communications staff was caught by surprise when excerpts of the book also raised the question of the existence of the "pee tape" and talked about the size of the president’s hands — details they were unprepared for and that set off a scramble inside the West Wing.

“It’s almost like Comey wrote some of the stuff in the book just to get under Trump’s skin and goad him into saying something outrageous,” said the former official. “With the salacious stuff that came out Thursday night, the possibility of Trump exploding has gone up.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered a harsh critique of the book during Friday’s televised briefing, saying it belonged "in the bargain bin of the fiction section." She lashed out at Comey at length with what appeared to be multiple prepared statements, listing off various occasions on which she alleged the former FBI director had lied.

“The American people see right through the blatant lies of a self-admitted leaker. This is nothing more than a poorly executed PR stunt by Comey to desperately rehabilitate his tattered reputation and enrich his own bank account,” Sanders said. “Instead of being remembered as a dedicated servant in the pursuit of justice like so many of his other colleagues at the FBI, Comey will be forever known as a disgraced partisan hack that broke his sacred trust with the president of the United States, the dedicated agents of the FBI and the American people he vowed to faithfully serve.”

“One of the president’s greatest achievements will go down as firing director James Comey,” she continued.

Trump’s top aides are expected to echo that message in television interviews in the coming days, and the RNC has distributed talking points to close advisers and surrogates.

Trump, for his part, is said to be fuming about the book, and White House aides are angry over what they see as Comey’s unnecessarily personal jabs at the president, the official said.

The White House press shop has also been signaling to outsiders that there is little it can do to stop the dominant Comey coverage because they have no control over the president ‘s reactions, which can quickly render any strategic planning meaningless, said one Republican close to the White House.

In the book, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, Comey, in describing his first meeting with the president in January 2017, wrote, “His face appeared slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles, and impressively coiffed, bright blond hair, which upon close inspection looked to be all his. I remember wondering how long it must take him in the morning to get that done. As he extended his hand, I made a mental note to check its size. It was smaller than mine, but did not seem unusually so.”

Trump unleashed on Comey on Friday morning.

“James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. 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,” Trump wrote in a statement that stretched across two Twitter posts. “He is a weak and untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI. 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!”

The feud is unlikely to dissolve quickly as Comey is embarking on a media blitz as part of his book tour. ABC News ran excerpts of the first interview with him on Friday, and he has interviews scheduled for the coming weeks on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and PBS, and is slated to tour for more than a month with stops in 11 different cities.

Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, told reporters at the White House Friday morning that Comey was taking "unnecessary immature potshots" at Trump.

“I’ve spent more time in the Oval Office in a given day than this man got to spend with the president over the course of his very brief tenure before he was fired,” she said during a separate interview on “Fox & Friends,” adding, “He’s taking one or two or three meetings with the president and retroactively putting his own spin on them to sell books. It seems to me like he sounds like a disgruntled ex-employee who after the fact wants to clear his conscience of what bothered him at the time.”

Even before excerpts of the book emerged, the Republican National Committee had launched a website seeking to discredit Comey, called lyincomey.com. The White House had outsourced much of the nitty-gritty of the response to the RNC.

Some in the White House believe the book gives them plenty of ammunition to attack Comey from another angle: as a sympathizer of former President Barack Obama.

Comey’s book offers portraits of a number of powerful Washington officials, and almost none come off as well as Obama, who appointed Comey to lead the FBI in 2013. Comey admits that he did not vote for Obama, and financially supported his opponents, but writes glowingly of the Obama he came to know, describing him as “an extraordinary listener” and a man of kindness and intellect.

“I had developed great respect for him as a leader and a person,” Comey writes at one point.

One central scene comes after the 2016 election, when Obama asks to speak with Comey privately after a White House meeting. Comey writes that he felt he had become something of a pariah at the White House, and that some there disdained him for his handling of the email investigation late in the election.

“I picked you to be FBI director because of your integrity and your ability,” Comey recalls Obama saying. “I want you to know that nothing — nothing — has happened in the last year to change my view.”

“Boy, were those words I needed to hear,” Comey writes. “I felt a wave of emotion, almost to the verge of tears. President Obama was not an outwardly emotional man in these kinds of meetings, but still I spoke in unusually emotional terms to him.”

In a passage that has ruffled feathers in White House, Comey adds: “I paused and then decided to add something. Maybe it was what I believe a large portion of the country was feeling. ‘Mr. President, my wife would kill me if I didn’t take the opportunity to thank you and to tell you how much I’m going to miss you.’ Although I hadn’t supported President Obama when he ran for office, I had developed great respect for him as a leader and a person, and it was only at that moment that I felt the full weight of his imminent departure and what it would mean. Unable to help myself, I added, ‘I dread the next four years, but in some ways, I feel more pressure to stay now.’”

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