White House: One of Trump’s greatest achievements will be ‘firing Comey’

The White House’s top spokeswoman blasted former FBI Director James Comey as a “disgraced partisan hack” on Friday as the administration seeks to discredit allegations he’s made in a new book.

“This is nothing more than a poorly executed PR stunt by Comey to desperately rehabilitate his tattered reputation and enrich his own bank account by peddling a book that belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters of Comey’s upcoming book “A Higher Loyalty” at the White House press briefing.

“One of the president’s greatest achievements will go down as firing Director James Comey,” she added.

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Comey’s new book, which focuses on the former FBI director’s brief stint at the agency before Trump fired him, is filled with significant accusations and criticisms aimed at Trump.

He compares Trump’s need for loyalty to that of a mob boss, claims that Trump repeatedly asked him to disprove lewd claims about him that surfaced in the so-called Steele dossier, and repeated the accusation that Trump told him to back off an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The book also includes some personal jabs at Trump, including references to the size of his hands and calling his face “slightly orange.”

When pressed about those personal comments, Huckabee Sanders took another shot at Comey.

“I don’t think we are surprised by the fact that James Comey continues to spread false information. The guy is known to be a liar and a leaker so there is not a lot about James Comey that we would find to be very surprising,” she said.

She also accused reporters of giving Comey too much oxygen.

“You guys spend hours upon hours every single day praising Jim Comey, propping him up, giving him the biggest platform. We shouldn’t be praising him, we should be putting him down, we should be taking him off of air instead of giving him minute after minute,” she said.

“This country has a lot of real problems. We should be talking about the economy, we should be talking about Syria, we should talk about the drug crisis. Instead, we are going to talk about Jim Comey,” she said.

Comey is scheduled to make numerous media appearances for his book starting Sunday. The book is released on Tuesday.

Sanders’ comments are part of a concerted push by the White House and the Republican National Committee to discredit Comey ahead of his book’s release. 

Trump on Friday morning called Comey “untruthful slime ball” in a tweet.