The former FBI director’s tell-all book surprised some West Wing aides with its jabs at Trump’s hand size and its talk of the ‘pee tape.’
President Donald Trump and his top aides wasted no time in launching pointed attacks on former FBI Director James Comey on Friday over his bombshell tell-all book — and the offensive is only expected to intensify in the coming days.
White House officials were scouring news reports and reaching out to allies who have copies of the book, hoping to home in on passages that they believe undercut Comey’s credibility or make him seem sympathetic to Democrats.
Trump’s allies are trying to avoid a repeat of the fallout from Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” the hard-edged insider account of life in Trump’s White House that caught many in the West Wing by surprise and dominated headlines for weeks.
But so far, the White House’s strategy was doing little to stop the barrage of news stories about the book.
Over the last 24 hours, a steady stream of embarrassing details from the book have emerged, including that chief of staff John Kelly allegedly called Trump “dishonorable” for firing Comey and that the president urged Comey to investigate unsubstantiated rumors that he was secretly filmed with prostitutes urinating in front of him in a Moscow hotel room. The New York Daily News pounced on the latter revelation with a front-page headline that read, “Pee Brain.”
The White House press shop originally had assumed the Comey book would re-litigate the former FBI director’s past testimony and statements, just re-packaged into a different form, said one former White House official.
The communications staff was caught by surprise when excerpts of the book also raised the question of the existence of the “pee tape” and talked about the size of the president’s hands — details they were unprepared for and that set off a scramble inside the West Wing.
“It’s almost like Comey wrote some of the stuff in the book just to get under Trump’s skin and goad him into saying something outrageous,” said the former official. “With the salacious stuff that came out Thursday night, the possibility of Trump exploding has gone up.”
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'The possibility of Trump exploding has gone up' https://t.co/QsC0CUHUZ2 via @AndrewRestuccia, @MatthewNussbaum and @nancook pic.twitter.com/XvG4p8S471
— POLITICO (@politico) April 13, 2018
Trump is mentally ill. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to push his buttons and get him to implode. The WH should take notice. They apparently don’t realize yet that you cannot control someone who is sick like this. They don’t listen to reason. Their actions are motivated not by logic but by their own insecurities and fears.
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