By Britt Greve
This past Friday morning, April 13, former FBI Director James Comey opened up about his role in the 2016 election, his interactions with President Trump and about the Russian involvement with George Stephanopoulos on ABC 20/20. This 40-minute interview has been cut down into 12 sections, including Trump, Russia and various other interactions while in his position as FBI Director.
The interview began with Comey’s reasoning as to why Donald Trump is unfit to be president. Comey recalls that when he first briefed the incoming president on during the transition, Trump replied, “Do I look like a guy who needs hookers?” Comey carefully left the issue hanging, saying, “I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible, but I don’t know.” Comey felt that he needed to rephrase how he has spoken about Trump in the past saying that he does not believe President Trump to be “mentally unfit” to be president, rather that Trump is “morally unfit” for the Oval Office, having no “external moral framework” for making decisions, according to USA Today.
According to the Guardian, James Comey said, “A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who constantly lies about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it: that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds.”
He even commented on President Trump’s decision to fire him. “That makes no sense at all,” Mr. Comey recalled in the Sunday interview of his reaction to the news of his firing last May. “I thought, ‘It’s crazy to fire me.’ I’m leading the investigation of Russian influence.” When he saw the news the same week that Mr. Trump had met with Russian officials in the Oval Office and called Mr. Comey a “nut job,” Mr. Comey said he saw right through it. “‘Wow’, was my reaction,” he said. “First of all, what are the Russians doing in the Oval Office? One, as a counterintelligence person, I’m thinking, ‘That’s crazy,’ without any Americans being present, one. And, two, the pretense is melting away.”
While the majority of the interview was about President Trump and his actions while in office, some people see the interview as an infomercial for his new book. Jamil Smith, a writer for the Rolling Stone, said that during his interview he “invites us to empathize with him –” for only $29.99. “What I would hope is that they would, by reading the book, come with me to October 28,” he told Stephanopoulos. “Come with me, and sit there with me.”
Ever since he was fired, Comey says that he gets noticed more than ever, but that “haters seem to stay away.” He does, however, say that he gets approached by people who offer statements of thanks and pity.
Regardless, most people took the comedic approach, hanging onto comments Comey made about the President. According to BBC, Comey said that when he first met the 6ft 3in president-elect, he appeared shorter than he did on TV. “His face appeared slightly orange,” says Mr. Comey, “with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles, and impressively coiffed, bright blonde hair, which upon close inspection looked to be all his. He even went as far as to say that when he shook Trump’s hand he “made a mental note to check its size. It was smaller than mine, but did not seem unusually so.”
