book? is it going to mess up your case? not directly but i submitted the book to the fbi for prepublication review and nobody asked me not to do it. also in the book, ben, there s a lot of personal descriptions of the president. people would say they were mildly petty attacks on the president, talking about his hand size, his tie, his tan, et cetera. can the defense use that if they need to, to say that, listen, james comey clearly has a ax to grind with the president? he shouldn t be trusted as a former fbi director but as somebody who doesn t like this president? well, look. they can try. at the end of the day, jim comey is in a very strong position here as a potential witness, as both as a public matter which i think is probably more important, but also as a potential witness in any proceeding. he is somebody who first of all
comey and flynn, et cetera. whether or not the decisions he had to make regarding hillary clinton were necessary and were done to burnish the reputation of the fbi as as opposed to doing the opposite. those are very weighty things that aren t about who s the biggest liar or what color someone s face is. that was the risk he did by indulging some impulse that led him to make those things in his book. in fairness, we have a story today in the paper about this question and the comey folks say, look, you guys are focusing on one small portion of the book, the fact is he offered vivid portraits of bush, obama and trump and he talks about his entire career in great detail. e problem with that argument, though, is that comey himself and his book people are smart enough to know if you do talk about the orange skin and the hand size at all, of course,
hill. i believe that he is a man of integrity. i don t agree with what he has chosen to do, i don t have anything to doubt what he is saying about the president. i believe his recollections are true and i think that ultimately he s helpful to the american people. the hand size and the hair color and maybe some of the salacious details, that too, that included? i would not have written a book that way, but i m talking more about his recollections and conversations about michael flynn, and obstruction of justice. i have no reason to doubt that is not true. ted lieu, thank you for being with us and thank you for your comments about the boston marathon. you said i looked great. that is not true. fact check false, but thank you nonetheless. paul ryan is taking questions now from reporters as he briefs them we re monitoring this. he s not taking questions yet. we ll have much more on this coming forward.
interesting to see who buys this book if there is as much buzz around it. we ll wait for your interview on thursday. thank you for the plug. what do you make, jen, of his explanation that the reason he includes the physical details about president trump in his book is not because he s trying to take a shot at president trump, writing about his hair or skin or his tan line under his eye or his hand size, but just trying to be a writer. was that convincing to you? not really. honestly i think i ve never written a book and you ve written books but anyone will say the editors are looking for anecdotes and color and observations and i m sure he has those con conversations. and yes, it is humorous we looked at the size of his hands something we ve all looked it but it dimminired the overall message. stick around and a reminder on thursday i m asking ex fbi director james comey the questions he has not answered yet in his first cable news
level and win by virtue of experience. why write a book about the hand size, the marital problems that he might have, rather than writing about running the greatest law enforcement agency in the world. that would have been something that would inspire people to follow comey continuously rather than to look down on him now. i talked to a lot of former agents, friends of mine, they all kind of feel the same way. this was really going into the gutter for him. and there s no reason for it. juliette, to what tim is saying, some of the thing the president said about comey in the last week, i ll just read a few of them. this is just the past week. i could have gotten much longer. i m being specific. slippery, out of whack, worst fbi director in history, proven leaker and liar, weak and untruthful slimeball. okay, that is petty, that is juvenile. i don t think anybody would disagree with that. okay, here is what comey has said about trump in his book and in interviews, again, over the past f