In new book, James Comey blasts untruthful, ‘ego-driven’ Donald Trump

Agencies
April 13, 2018

Washington, Apr 13: Former FBI Director James Comey blasts President Donald Trump as unethical and “untethered to truth” in a sharply critical new book that describes Trump as fixated in the early days of his administration on having the FBI debunk salacious rumors he insisted were untrue but could distress his wife.

In the forthcoming book, Comey compares Trump to a mafia don and calls his leadership of the country “ego driven and about personal loyalty.”

He also reveals new details about his interactions with Trump and his own decision-making in handling the Hillary Clinton email investigation before the 2016 election. He casts Trump as a mobster-like figure who sought to blur the line between law enforcement and politics and tried to pressure him personally regarding his investigation into Russian election interference.

The book adheres closely to Comey’s public testimony and written statements about his contacts with Trump and his growing concern about Trump’s integrity. It also includes strikingly personal jabs at Trump that appear sure to irritate the president.

The 6-foot-8 Comey describes Trump as shorter than he expected with a “too long” tie and “bright white half-moons” under his eyes that he suggests came from tanning goggles. He also says he made a conscious effort to check the president’s hand size, saying it was “smaller than mine but did not seem unusually so.”

The book, “A Higher Loyalty,” is to be released next week. The Associated Press purchased a copy this week. “Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation,” Comey writes, calling the administration a “forest fire” that can’t be contained by ethical leaders within the government.

On a more-personal level, Comey describes Trump repeatedly asking him to consider investigating an allegation involving Trump and Russian prostitutes urinating on a bed in a Moscow hotel, in order to prove it was a lie. Trump has strongly denied the allegation, and Comey says that it appeared the president wanted it investigated to reassure his wife, Melania Trump.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017, setting off a scramble at the Justice Department that led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation. Mueller’s probe has expanded to include whether Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey, which the president denies.

Trump has assailed Comey as a “showboat” and a “liar.”

Comey’s account lands at a particularly sensitive moment for Trump and the White House. Officials there describe the president as enraged over a recent FBI raid of his personal lawyer’s home and office, raising the prospect that he could fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller, or try to shut down the probe on his own. The Republican National Committee is poised to lead the pushback effort against Comey by launching a website and supplying surrogates with talking points that question his credibility.

Trump has said he fired Comey because of his handling of the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s email practices. Trump used the investigation as a cudgel in the campaign and repeatedly said Clinton should be jailed for using a personal email system while serving as secretary of state. Democrats, on the other hand, have accused Comey of politicizing the investigation, and Clinton herself has said it hurt her election prospects.

Comey writes that he regrets his approach and some of the wording he used in his July 2016 press conference in which he announced the decision not to prosecute Clinton. But he says he believes he did the right thing by going before the cameras and making his statement, noting that the Justice Department had done so in other high profile cases.

Every person on the investigative team, Comey writes, found that there was no prosecutable case against Clinton and that the FBI didn’t find that she lied under its questioning.

He also reveals new details about how the government had unverified classified information that he believes could have been used to cast doubt on Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s independence in the Clinton probe. While Comey does not outline the details of the information — and says he didn’t see indications of Lynch inappropriately influencing the investigation — he says it worried him that the material could be used to attack the integrity of the probe and the FBI’s independence.

Comey’s book will be heavily scrutinized by the president’s legal team looking for any inconsistencies between it and his public testimony, under oath, before Congress. They will be looking to impeach Comey’s credibility as a key witness in Mueller’s obstruction investigation, which the president has cast as a political motivated witch hunt.

The former FBI director provides new details of his firing. He writes that then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly — now Trump’s chief of staff — offered to quit out of disgust at how Comey was dismissed. Kelly has been increasingly marginalized in the White House and the president has mused to confidants about firing him.

Comey also writes extensively about his first meeting with Trump after the election, a briefing in January 2017 at Trump Tower in New York City. Others in the meeting included Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, Michael Flynn, who would become national security adviser, and incoming press secretary, Sean Spicer. Comey was also joined by NSA Director Mike Rogers, CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

After Clapper briefed the team on the intelligence community’s findings of Russian election interference, Comey said he was taken aback by what the Trump team didn’t ask.

“They were about to lead a country that had been attacked by a foreign adversary, yet they had no questions about what the future Russian threat might be,” Comey writes. Instead, they launched into a strategy session about how to “spin what we’d just told them” for the public.

Comey says he had flashbacks to his time investigating the Italian Mafia as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, thinking that Trump “was trying to make us all part of the same family.”

“For my entire career, intelligence was a thing of mine and political spin a thing of yours. Team Trump wanted to change that,” he writes.

Comey then describes talking to Trump one-on-one after the broader meeting.

He says he described the allegations about Russian prostitutes. He writes that he told Trump about the dossier because it was the FBI’s responsibility to protect the presidency from coercion related to harmful allegations, whether supported or not. Comey said he left out one detail involving an allegation that the prostitutes had urinated on a bed once used by the Obamas.

Trump raised the subject again a week later, after the dossier had been made public. He then told Comey, the director writes, that he had not stayed in the hotel and that the most salacious charge could not have been true because, Trump said, “I’m a germaphobe. There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.”

Comey writes that Trump raised the issue again, unprompted, during their one-on-one dinner at the White House and it bothered the president that there might be even “a one percent chance” his wife might think it was true.

Comey then registers surprise, writing that he thought to himself “why his wife would think there was any chance, even a small one, that he had been with prostitutes urinating on each other in a Moscow hotel room.”

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News Network
March 19,2020

Rome, Mar 19: Italy on Wednesday reported 475 new deaths from the novel coronavirus, the highest one-day official toll of any nation since the first case was detected in China late last year.

The total number of deaths in Italy has reached 2,978, more than half of all the cases recorded outside China, while the number of infections stood at 35,713.

The previous record high of 368 deaths was also recorded in Italy, on Sunday. The nation of 60 million has now recorded 34.2 percent of all the deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 across the world.

With the death rate still climbing despite the Mediterranean country entering a second week under an effective lockdown, officials urged Italians to have faith and to stay strong.

"They main thing is, do not give up," Italian National Institute of Health chief Silvio Brusaferro said in a nationally televised press conference.

"It will take a few days before we see the benefits" of containment measures, said Brusaferro. "We must maintain these measures to see their effect, and above all to protect the most vulnerable."

Imposed nationally on March 12, the shutdown of most Italian businesses and a ban on public gatherings are due to expire on March 25.

But school closures and other measures, such as a ban fan attendance at sporting events, are due to run on until April 3.

A top government minister hinted Wednesday that the school closure would be extended well into next month, if not longer.

The rates within Italy itself remained stable, with two-thirds of the deaths -- 1,959 in all -- reported in the northern Lombardy region around Milan, the Italian financial and fashion capital.

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Agencies
June 24,2020

Washington, Jun 24: Twitter has once again flagged a tweet from US President Donald Trump which promoted violence by saying if protesters tried to set up an "autonomous zone" in Washington, DC they would be met with "serious force".

This is the fourth time Twitter has red flagged Trump's tweet for glorifying violence or violating its policies.

Trump has been critical of the "autonomous zone" in Seattle, an area occupied by protestors for much of this month.

"We've placed a public interest notice on this Tweet for violating our policy against abusive behaviour, specifically, the presence of a threat of harm against an identifiable group," Twitter's safety team tweeted late Tuesday.

Trump had tweeted: "There will never be an ‘Autonomous Zone' in Washington, D.C., as long as I'm your President. If they try they will be met with serious force!"

Twitter earlier labeled a video tweeted by him which mocked CNN as manipulated media.

According to Twitter, "this Tweet has been labeled per our synthetic and manipulated media policy to give people more context".

In May, Twitter labeled two Trump tweets that made false claims about mail-in ballots in California.

Twitter later labeled another Trump tweet glorifying violence in which he said, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

Facebook also removed a Trump campaign ad featuring a symbol used by Nazis for political dissenters, saying the ad violated its policies.

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News Network
May 19,2020

May 19: A Chinese laboratory has been developing a drug it believes has the power to bring the coronavirus pandemic to a halt.

The outbreak first emerged in China late last year before spreading across the world, prompting an international race to find treatments and vaccines.

A drug being tested by scientists at China's prestigious Peking University could not only shorten the recovery time for those infected, but even offer short-term immunity from the virus, researchers say.

Sunney Xie, director of the university's Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics, told AFP that the drug has been successful at the animal testing stage.

"When we injected neutralising antibodies into infected mice, after five days the viral load was reduced by a factor of 2,500," said Xie.

"That means this potential drug has (a) therapeutic effect."

The drug uses neutralising antibodies -- produced by the human immune system to prevent the virus infecting cells -- which Xie's team isolated from the blood of 60 recovered patients.

A study on the team's research, published Sunday in the scientific journal Cell, suggests that using the antibodies provides a potential "cure" for the disease and shortens recovery time.

Xie said his team had been working "day and night" searching for the antibody.

"Our expertise is single-cell genomics rather than immunology or virology. When we realised that the single-cell genomic approach can effectively find the neutralising antibody we were thrilled."

He added that the drug should be ready for use later this year and in time for any potential winter outbreak of the virus, which has infected 4.8 million people around the world and killed more than 315,000.

"Planning for the clinical trial is underway," said Xie, adding it will be carried out in Australia and other countries since cases have dwindled in China, offering fewer human guinea pigs for testing.

"The hope is these neutralised antibodies can become a specialised drug that would stop the pandemic," he said.

China already has five potential coronavirus vaccines at the human trial stage, a health official said last week.

But the World Health Organization has warned that developing a vaccine could take 12 to 18 months.

Scientists have also pointed to the potential benefits of plasma -- a blood fluid -- from recovered individuals who have developed antibodies to the virus enabling the body's defences to attack it.

More than 700 patients have received plasma therapy in China, a process which authorities said showed "very good therapeutic effects".

"However, it (plasma) is limited in supply," Xie said, noting that the 14 neutralising antibodies used in their drug could be put into mass production quickly.

Using antibodies in drug treatments is not a new approach, and it has been successful in treating several other viruses such as HIV, Ebola and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).

Xie said his researchers had "an early start" since the outbreak started in China before spreading to other countries.

Ebola drug Remdesivir was considered a hopeful early treatment for COVID-19 -- clinical trials in the US showed it shortened the recovery time in some patients by a third -- but the difference in mortality rate was not significant.

The new drug could even offer short-term protection against the virus.

The study showed that if the neutralising antibody was injected before the mice were infected with the virus, the mice stayed free of infection and no virus was detected.

This may offer temporary protection for medical workers for a few weeks, which Xie said they are hoping to "extend to a few months".

More than 100 vaccines for COVID-19 are in the works globally, but as the process of vaccine development is more demanding, Xie is hoping that the new drug could be a faster and more efficient way to stop the global march of the coronavirus.

"We would be able to stop the pandemic with an effective drug, even without a vaccine," he said.

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