.@GStephanopoulos: “Is Donald Trump unfit to be president?”
@Comey: “Yes, but not in the way I often hear people talk about it…I don’t think he’s medically unfit to be president. I think he’s morally unfit to be president.” https://t.co/nzGYlTmLXf #Comey pic.twitter.com/4eag9flFZ2— ABC News (@ABC) April 16, 2018
James Comey’s kicking off a media blitz ahead of the release of his (already) best-selling memoir, A Higher Loyalty, which comes out on April 17. Well, President Trump spent Sunday morning tweet-calling him the “WORST FBI Director” of all time. Yet his 20/20 interview with George Stephanopoulos continued as planned after Comey (in previews) teased the pee tape as possibly real and compared Trump to a mob boss. How did things go?
Weird. This sit-down is the former FBI director’s first interview since Trump fired him after pressuring him to stop investigating Michael Flynn. One of the more revealing moments actually occurred near the end of the talk, when Comey answered whether or not he feels that Trump is unfit to be president:
“Yes. But not in the way m– I often hear people talk about it. I don’t buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or early stages of dementia. He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who’s tracking conversations and knows what’s going on. I don’t think he’s medically unfit to be president. I think he’s morally unfit to be president.
“A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly 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. And that’s not a policy statement. Again, I don’t care what your views are on guns or immigration or taxes.”
Comey continued before ultimately stating that he doesn’t feel that Trump “reflect[s] the values of this country.” In particular, he believes that Trump doesn’t value truth (and couldn’t even stop lying about his inauguration crowd size), which Comey believes is the most important value to uphold.
Throughout the interview, Comey sounded grateful for his “strange and wonderful career,” in which he prosecuted mafia figures and Martha Stewart (a case that he “initially hated”), but an exhaustive portion reveals how Comey reopened the Clinton email probe because he expected Hillary to win (and he believed that not reopening the probe would have discredited her presidency). He expressed regrets for the mistakes he made during the probe, and Comey admitted that he felt “totally alone, that everybody hated me” for ten full days. Still, he believes that “it really was the right thing to do.”
Otherwise, it’s fairly clear that much of the quotable content in this interview was already released — *cough pee tape cough* — but if you missed that moment, you can read the full 20/20 transcript here or watch below.
(Via ABC News)