WASHINGTON — If there was any chance that President Trump and James B. Comey could have avoided all-out war, it ended Sunday night.
That was when ABC News aired an interview with Mr. Comey, the president’s fired F.B.I. director, as he uses a publicity blitz for his searing tell-all memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” to raise the alarm about the dangers he says Mr. Trump poses to the country.
While ABC aired one hour of its conversation with Mr. Comey, it had conducted a five-hour interview with him, a transcript of which was obtained by The New York Times. In it, Mr. Comey called Mr. Trump a serial liar who treated women like “meat,” and described him as a “stain” on everyone who worked for him.
He said a salacious allegation that Mr. Trump had cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow had left him vulnerable to blackmail by the Russian government. And he asserted that the president was incinerating the country’s crucial norms and traditions like a wildfire. He compared the president to a mafia boss.
“Our president must embody respect and adhere to the values that are at the core of this country,” Mr. Comey told ABC’s chief anchor, George Stephanopoulos, on the program “20/20.” “The most important being truth. This president is not able to do that. He is morally unfit to be president.”
The interview with Mr. Comey and the publicity tour for his book, which is scheduled to hit bookstores on Tuesday, amount to a remarkable public assault on a sitting president by someone who served at the highest levels in the government.
The stakes for both men could hardly be higher. Mr. Comey seems likely to be the star witness in any obstruction of justice case that might be brought against the president by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the sprawling Russia investigation. Mr. Trump’s legal fate, as well as his political fortunes in Washington, may depend on whether he succeeds in undermining the credibility of Mr. Comey and the law enforcement institutions he views as arrayed against him.
While many of Mr. Trump’s critics believe that the proper remedy for his perceived transgressions is impeachment, Mr. Comey insisted that would just “let the American people off the hook.” He said the public was “duty bound” to vote Mr. Trump out of office in the next election.
“You cannot have, as president of the United States, someone who does not reflect the values that I believe Republicans treasure and Democrats treasure and independents treasure,” Mr. Comey said. “That is the core of this country. That’s our foundation. And so impeachment, in a way, would short-circuit that.”
Epic Battle of Wills
Mr. Comey’s intensely personal attacks — a reflection of his self-righteousness, his detractors say — are all the more combustible because they are aimed directly at a president who has said with pride on Twitterthat “when someone attacks me, I always attack back...except 100x more.”
As if on cue, hours before the interview aired, Mr. Trump called Mr. Comey a “slimeball” for the second time in three days, saying in a pair of early-morning Twitter posts that he belonged in jail for what the president said were lies to Congress and leaks of classified information. In another post, Mr. Trump said Mr. Comey would go down in history as “the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!” He added that “he is not smart!”