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A combination of file photos show U.S. President Donald Trump in the White House in Washington on April 9, 2018 and former FBI Director James Comey on Capitol Hill on June 8, 2017.CARLOS BARRIA/Reuters

It has been nearly a year since Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey over what the President famously dubbed “this Russia thing” – the investigation into the Kremlin’s meddling with the 2016 election and its contacts with Mr. Trump’s circle.

Now, in his 290-page memoir, Mr. Comey is holding little back. Parts of A Higher Loyalty describe, in cinematic detail, how the President repeatedly pushed him to “lift the cloud” of the investigation before turfing him. Others offer a damning critique of Mr. Trump’s “forest fire” of a government, and his penchant for telling “baffling, unnecessary lies.”

“Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation,” Mr. Comey warns. “What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay.”

Related: Comey says Trump ‘untethered to truth’ in new book

Read more: Trump slams former FBI director Comey as ‘slime ball’ over critical memoir

Mr. Trump responded Friday, branding Mr. Comey a “LEAKER & LIAR” and “a weak and untruthful slime ball” on Twitter.

Here are five highlights from the most anticipated political book of the spring.

The Donald reminds Mr. Comey of a Mafia don

From their first meeting, at Trump Tower on Jan. 6 of last year, Mr. Comey felt Mr. Trump was trying to make him “part of the same family” and a member of “Team Trump.” Sitting in a conference room high above Manhattan, Mr. Comey writes, he suddenly thought of the social clubs of the mobsters he had prosecuted early in his career.

It was a feeling that would only intensify.

At a one-on-one White House dinner a week after the President took office, Mr. Comey recalls, Mr. Trump tried to establish a “patronage relationship” by not-so-subtly implying that his job was dependent on ending the Russia investigation. The President told him that “he could ‘make a change’ at the FBI if he wanted to” – then bluntly told Mr. Comey: “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.”

The demand, he writes, was like a “Cosa Nostra induction ceremony – with Trump in the role of the family boss asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man.’”

Mr. Trump is obsessed with the unproven ‘golden showers’ video

At the Trump Tower briefing, Mr. Comey told the soon-to-be president about the dossier assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele alleging that the Russians had secretly videoed Mr. Trump with prostitutes in the presidential suite of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton in 2013.

Mr. Trump denied the accusation, Mr. Comey recalls, rhetorically asking “whether he seemed like a guy who needed the service of prostitutes.”

Mr. Comey says he didn’t tell Mr. Trump about the most salacious part of the dossier – that, according to Mr. Steele’s sources, Mr. Trump had paid the prostitutes to urinate on one another to defile the bed then-president Barack Obama had slept in. But that detail was soon published by news website Buzzfeed and, according to Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump couldn’t get over it.

“I’m a germaphobe,” Mr. Comey quotes the President as telling him in a telephone call a few days after the initial briefing. “There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.”

At a White House dinner on Jan. 27, Mr. Comey writes that Mr. Trump asked him to investigate the matter so he could debunk it.

Mr. Trump’s hair is real and his hands aren’t really that small

Even Mr. Comey wanted to know whether the President’s gravity-defying coiffure is some sort of elaborate weave, and whether there was any truth to the running joke that his hands are disproportionate to his body.

So, he made sure to check it out at that Trump Tower briefing.

Mr. Comey describes Mr. Trump’s hairdo as “impressively coiffed, bright blond hair, which upon close inspection looked to be all his” and marvelled at the amount of time he must spend on it every morning.

“As he extended his hand, I made a mental note to check its size,” Mr. Comey writes. “It was smaller than mine, but did not seem unusually so.”

Mr. Obama reassured Mr. Comey after he brought up the Clinton e-mails right before the election

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton blames Mr. Comey’s decision – two weeks before the 2016 election – to inform Congress he was reopening an investigation into her use of e-mail for costing her the vote.

But the then-FBI director received some comfort from an unexpected source: Mr. Obama.

“I picked you to be FBI director because of your integrity and your ability,” Mr. Obama said, according to Mr. Comey, shortly after Ms. Clinton lost. “I want you to know that nothing – nothing – has happened in the last year to change my view.”

“I have hated the last year,” an emotional Mr. Comey replied. “I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

“I know,” he recalls Mr. Obama responding. “I know.”

Then, Mr. Comey says, he made a candid admission: “I dread the next four years, but in some ways, I feel more pressure to stay now.”

John Kelly considered resigning over Mr. Comey’s firing

When Mr. Comey first saw his firing announced on television, he assumed someone was playing a practical joke.

But he soon realized it was all too real.

Amid the scramble to figure out what was going on, Mr. Comey received a call from John Kelly, who was at the time the secretary of Homeland Security. Mr. Kelly said he was planning to quit in protest of Mr. Trump’s decision, Mr. Comey recounts. Mr. Comey told Mr. Kelly not to.

“I urged Kelly not to do that, arguing that the country needed principled people around this president,” Mr. Comey writes. “Especially this president.”

Mr. Kelly evidently took the advice to heart: Far from resigning, Mr. Kelly took over in August as Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, in a bid to impose discipline on his chaotic White House.

President Donald Trump denied allegations of lewd behaviour involving prostitutes made in an intelligence dossier given to U.S. intelligence agencies, fired FBI Director James Comey wrote in an upcoming memoir, according to the Washington Post.

Reuters

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