Trump calls Comey 'weak, untruthful slime ball'

US President Donald Trump on Friday slammed former FBI Director James Comey as a "weak and untruthful slime ball" and a "proven leaker and liar", a day after explosive excerpts from the latter's tell-all book surfaced in media reports.

Comey's book "A Higher Loyalty" details his conversations with the President, compares Trump to a "mob boss", and slams the "forest fire that is the Trump presidency", CNN reported.

The US President in a tweet said: "James Comey is a proven leaker and liar. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did-until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked classified information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under oath."

"He is a weak and untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI. His handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton case and the events surrounding it, will go down as one of the worst 'botch jobs' of history. It was my great honour to fire James Comey!" Trump tweeted.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017 in an act that has been under scrutiny by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Among the many revelations was that Trump fixated on unconfirmed allegations in a widely circulated intelligence dossier that Russians had filmed him interacting with prostitutes in Moscow in 2013, the Washington Post reported.

The former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation testified in June that he gave some of his memos of conversations he had with Trump to a Columbia University professor and that he had written the memos specifically to avoid including classified information.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders also attacked Comey's credibility and tweeted: "One of the few areas of true bipartisan consensus in Washington is Comey has no credibility."

Her post also included the link to a GOP video titled "Comey Not Credible, Just Ask Democrats".

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway also criticized Comey. "We find Comey has a revisionist view of history and seems like a disgruntlement ex-employee," she told reporters.

--IANS

soni/vm