Former FBI Director James Comey is "a liar and a leaker," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Friday, and one of President Donald Trump's "greatest achievements will go down as firing Director Comey."
"He'll be known as a disgraced partisan hack who broke his sacred trust with the president of the United States, the dedicated agents of the FBI and the American people he vowed to faithfully serve," Sanders told reporters at the daily briefing.
Comey's book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership," is due out Tuesday — and he has already ripped Trump in promotional interviews as a "mob boss" and as being "untethered to truth."
Trump has relentlessly bashed Comey on Twitter, saying Friday that he was an "untruthful slime ball" and that "Comey should be prosecuted" for leaking classified information.
Sanders described the upcoming book as "nothing more than a poorly-executed PR stunt by Comey.
"He's padding his pockets with a book that should be in the basement bargain bin.
"The American people see right through the blatant lies of the self-admitted leaker.
"It's clear that Comey has a credibility problem," Sanders later said, adding that his reputation was "one of the few issues in Washington that both Democrats and Republicans agree on.
"Comey's higher loyalty is clear that it's only to himself," she said. "If you can get this group of people to agree on something, I think you would have to be right."
Sanders also excoriated the media for "praising" Comey instead of covering "issues that people care about" and defended President Trump's attacks on the former director.
"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," she said. "We should be putting him down and taking him off of air instead of giving him minute after minute.
"This country has a lot of real problems. We should be talking about the economy and Syria and the drug crisis.
"But instead, we're going to talk about Jim Comey," Sanders said.
"You guys will cover it endlessly all day today, all day tomorrow — and my guess every day next week, with very little time given to the issues that people care about.
"The president has every right to call out that individual that you guys are propping up and saying that there are problems and that we should be concerned about it."
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