I just read the memos that James Comey wrote after meeting with Donald Trump shortly after the president took office.
I’ll attach the link from which I read them to this post, so you can see the memos for yourself.
Maybe someone else can find it, but for the life of me I cannot detect a single overtly hostile passage in any of it. Comey, of course, is the former FBI director whom the president fired over “the Russia thing.” As one might expect, Trump has since backed off that stated reason for firing Comey, although he hasn’t yet denied he told Russian visitors to the Oval Office that he called Comey a “nut job.”
But throughout the memos, there are references to the compliments that the president laid on Comey, how he thought the FBI director was doing a good job, how the president had heard good things about Comey, how he wished him well.
Yes, there is the reference to the president saying how he demanded “loyalty” among those who work for him. Comey chronicles in that memo that he didn’t respond to the president’s assertion; but again, he doesn’t offer any commentary about the nature of the statement. He merely said he didn’t respond.
Trump, quite expectedly, has denounced the memos. He calls them lies. He accuses Comey of being a serial liar — or words to that effect.
But as I perused the Comey memos I am struck by their tone.
Comey comes off according to my reading of his comments — which I understand were written “contemporaneously” — as a squeaky clean professional.
Maybe that’s why — now that I think about it — the president is so damn angry at the man he fired. James Comey is the kind of man that Donald Trump is not.