As Michael Wolff well knows, nothing spurs book sales like presidential blowback. Fire and Fury shot to the top of best-seller lists after Donald Trump called it a “fake book” and its author “mentally deranged,” and a similar phenomenon has occurred in the case of A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey, who Trump on Friday morning deemed a “proven LEAKER & LIAR” and an “untruthful slime ball.” While the former F.B.I. director’s highly anticipated 304-page tell-all is not set to be released until Tuesday, leaked excerpts have already begun to make the rounds. As former New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani notes in her review, Comey displays a perspicacious eye for detail—one similar to Saul Bellow’s manic realism in Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, and parts of Ravelstein.

The book is suffused with Comey’s personal assessments of Washington fixtures, such as Barack Obama, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch, and Denis McDonough. (Noticeably absent: an analysis of Hillary Clinton, whom Comey says he has never met in person.) Nor is it devoid of the sorts of tabloid-style tidbits that made Wolff’s book a must-read, such as descriptions of the president’s hand size and speculation around allegations contained within the Steele dossier—details that, along with Comey’s much-hyped Sunday night interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, will doubtless help to bolster sales. Based on early excerpts, we’ve compiled some of the book’s most pivotal takeaways.

Trump was obsessed with “The Pee Tape”

Arguably the most cringe-worthy interaction Comey describes is his conversation with President-Elect Trump about the infamous dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, which included the unconfirmed and salacious allegation that the Kremlin had damaging footage of Trump interacting with Russian prostitutes at a hotel in Moscow. According to Comey’s retelling, Trump “strongly denied the allegations, asking—rhetorically, I assumed—whether he seemed like a guy who needed the service of prostitutes. He then began discussing cases where women had accused him of sexual assault, a subject I had not raised. He mentioned a number of women, and seemed to have memorized their allegations.”

But Trump wouldn’t let the matter rest, bringing up the allegations at least four times. Comey writes that Trump offered varying explanations as to why the claim that he watched prostitutes urinate on one another in the hotel room Barack and Michelle Obama previously stayed in during a visit to Moscow couldn’t be true. “I’m a germaphobe,” Trump said in a January phone call, according to Comey. “There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.” The former F.B.I. director also says that Trump asked him whether the bureau could probe the allegations in the dossier to disprove them, and whether anything could be done to “lift the cloud,” which he said was upsetting to his wife, Melania Trump.

Comey admits he might have bungled the Clinton e-mail probe

In What Happened, her memoir about the 2016 presidential race, Clinton skewered Comey’s decision to announce, 11 days before the election, that the F.B.I. had reopened its investigation after a trove of e-mails was discovered on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The former presidential hopeful wrote that she felt “shivved” by Comey. But though Comey floats the possibility that his decision did impact the outcome of the election, he once again defends it in the book. “It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls,” Comey writes. “But I don’t know.”