President Donald Trump slammed James Comey on Sunday, saying the former FBI director is "not very smart" and will go down in history as the worst head of the bureau.

"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!," the president wrote on Twitter, in one in a string of messages criticizing Comey.


Trump and his allies have sought to undermine Comey with a barrage of insults before Comey promotes his soon-to-be-released memoir, "A Higher Loyalty," with a prime-time interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. According to excerpts from the book, Comey describes Trump as someone with ethics akin to those of a mob boss. He also writes that Trump is "untethered to truth."

Adding to his past attacks on Comey, Trump repeatedly describing the actions of the former FBI director as worthy of "jail" time.

"The big questions in Comey’s badly reviewed book aren’t answered like, how come he gave up Classified Information (jail), why did he lie to Congress (jail), why did the DNC refuse to give Server to the FBI (why didn’t they TAKE it), why the phony memos, McCabe’s $700,000 & more?," Trump wrote on Twitter.

The president's Sunday message rehashed a number of controversies he and other conservatives have seized on when talking about Comey's tenure at the agency. Those episodes include: whether part of Comey's testimony in front of senators last summer amounts to lying under oath, the lack of cooperation from the Democratic National Committee in the investigation into the hacking of its server, the fact that Comey kept memos of his conversations with Trump, and the amount of money former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's wife, Jill, received during a campaign for the Virginia Senate from organizations linked to an ally of Hillary Clinton.


Additional excerpts from the book describe Comey as holding onto unverified and classified information about then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Comey has previously stated that Lynch's decision to meet with former President Bill Clinton on the tarmac in Arizona, while the FBI was still investigating Hillary Clinton, was part of the reason that Comey decided to break Justice Department guidelines and hold a public news conference announcing Clinton would not face criminal charges. This still-classified information, Comey writes, gave him even more motivation to go over Lynch.

"Comey throws AG Lynch 'under the bus!' Why can’t we all find out what happened on the tarmac in the back of the plane with Wild Bill and Lynch?," Trump wrote on Twitter about Comey's treatment of Lynch. "Was she promised a Supreme Court seat, or AG, in order to lay off Hillary. No golf and grandkids talk (give us all a break)!"

Trump also seized on the possibility that Comey's decision to announce that the FBI was reopening its investigation into Clinton might have been affected by Clinton's standing in the polls.

"Unbelievably, James Comey states that Polls, where Crooked Hillary was leading, were a factor in the handling (stupidly) of the Clinton Email probe," Trump wrote. "In other words, he was making decisions based on the fact that he thought she was going to win, and he wanted a job. Slimeball!"


What Comey actually wrote was that it is possible his feelings might have been affected, on an unconscious level.

“I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win,” Comey writes. “I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption. I don’t know. Certainly not consciously but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me."