Samples

The Times has some highlights of The Interview.

Asked if he believes Mr. Trump is unfit for office, Mr. Comey was quick to say yes, but not for reasons of his mental state.

Instead, Mr. Comey called Mr. Trump “morally unfit.”

“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,” Mr. Comey said.

The Guardian also has a sampling.

Life in the Comey household must have been awkward after the election

Early in the interview, Comey said he did not vote in the presidential election, explaining: “I’m the director of the FBI. I’m trying to be outside of politics so intentionally tried not to follow it a lot.” But he said his wife, Patrice, and his four daughters all wanted Clinton to win and took part in the 2017 women’s march in Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration.

Patrice told Stephanopoulos: “I wanted a woman president really badly, and I supported Hillary Clinton. A lot of my friends worked for her. And I was devastated when she lost.”

USA Today did its own interview.

Did Trump immediately strike Comey as a mob boss, to which he likens him in the book? The comparison hit Comey right away, he says, though he himself initially denied it. No, Comey doesn’t think Trump “is out breaking legs or shaking down shopkeepers,” but he says the leadership culture is similar: “You are judged entirely by your fealty, your loyalty, to that boss.”

Would Trump pardoning Scooter Libby — as he later did Friday — signal to Trump allies that they should stick with him? “There is a reason that George W. Bush refused to pardon Scooter Libby,” Comey says. “He examined that case really closely.”

ABC has the transcript.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You lay out qualities of an ethical leader. What are they?

JAMES COMEY: First and foremost, it’s someone who realizes that lasting values have to be at the center of their leadership. Whether they’re in government or in the private sector or leading a university, they have to focus on things like fairness and integrity and, most of all, the truth. That the truth matters.

Excuse me for just a second.

Why truth matters benson.jpg

Sorry. Back to transcript.

JAMES COMEY: I worry that the norms at the center of this country– we can fight as Americans about guns or taxes or immigration, and we always have. But what we have in common is a set of norms. Most importantly, the truth. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” right? Truth is the fourth word of that sentence. That’s what we are. And if we lose that, if we lose tethering of our leaders to that truth, what are we? And so I started to worry. Actually, the foundation of this country is in jeopardy when we stop measuring our leaders against that central value of the truth.

Of course the irony there is that the truths in that sentence are not self-evident to everyone, and some of the people who signed up to them didn’t entirely put them into practice, and that anyway they said “all men” instead of “all people.” But it is still a resonant and memorable sentence.

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