Fired FBI Director James Comey said Thursday night that President Trump is constantly seeking a way to fill the “emptiness inside of him,” and that he has never seen an adult need as much affirmation as the president.

“I think he has an emptiness inside of him, and a hunger for affirmation, that I’ve never seen in an adult,” Comey told The New Yorker during an interview Thursday. “It’s all, ‘What will fill this hole?’”

Comey said he wasn’t sure why FBI sources told the New York Times a week before the 2016 elections that there was “no clear link to Russia,” because he indicates that at that point in time, the FBI had concluded that Russian government was supporting the Trump campaign.

Trump said he fired Comey last year because of recommendations he received from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote a memo outlining the mistakes Comey made in his investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

The president maintains that he did not fire Comey because of the probe involving Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.