JAMES COMEY/MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Donald Trump and his top aides launched pointed attacks on James Comey on Friday [4-13-18] over his forthcoming tell-all — and the offensive is only expected to intensify in the coming days as the former FBI director embarks on a series of media interviews ahead of the book’s Tuesday [4-17-18] release. White House officials were scouring news reports and reaching out to allies who have copies of the book, hoping to identify passages that they believe undercut Comey’s credibility or make him seem sympathetic to Democrats. Trump’s allies are keen to avoid a repeat of the fallout from Michael Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury,’ the hard-edged insider account of life in Trump’s White House that caught many in the West Wing by surprise and dominated headlines for weeks. But so far, the White House’s strategy was doing little to stop the barrage of news stories about the book.”
–Anderw Restuccia, Matthew Nussbaum and Nancy Cook, “‘The possibility of Trump exploding has gone up’” Politico, April 13, 2018 3:37 pm