Tonight on ABC…
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, New York Times
Published: April 15, 2018
Updated: April 15, 2018 at 05:35 PM
WASHINGTON — If there was any chance that President Donald Trump and James Comey could avoid all-out war, it will end Sunday night.
That is when ABC News will broadcast an hourlong interview with Comey, the president’s fired FBI director, as he seeks to publicize his searing tell-all memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.”
Clips aired by the network show Comey questioning Trump’s character as he says that Trump repeatedly pressed him to conduct an investigation to refute a salacious allegation that he had cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow.
In the book, which is scheduled to be formally released Tuesday, Comey goes just as far, dropping any pretense of comity with the president he briefly served. He calls Trump unethical and says he is a serial liar who could be vulnerable to blackmail by the Russian government. He compares the president to a mafia boss and says his tenure has been like a forest fire that is incinerating the country’s important norms and traditions.
“Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation,” Comey writes in the book.
The interview with Comey and the weekslong media blitz he plans for his book amount to a remarkable public assault on a sitting president by someone who served at the highest levels of power in the government.
The stakes for both men could hardly be higher. Comey seems likely to be the star witness in any obstruction of justice case brought against the president by Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the sprawling Russia investigation. Trump’s legal fate, as well as his political fortunes in Washington, may depend on whether he succeeds in undermining the credibility of Comey and the law enforcement institutions he views as arrayed against him.