A few weeks before his private dinner with the president, shortly before his inauguration, Comey had a similar feeling about mob loyalty pledges during his first meeting with Trump, he writes. Comey and other top intelligence officials were at Trump Tower to brief the president-elect, Vice President-elect Mike Pence, and a small circle of their top aides on Russian efforts to influence the election.
Rather than ask about how to meet the threat from Russia, Comey writes, Trump, Pence and incoming White House aides Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer quickly focused on “how they could spin what we’d just told them,” debating “how to position these findings for maximum political advantage.”
“I sat there thinking, Holy crap, they are trying to make each of us ‘amica nostra’ – friend of ours. To draw us in,” Comey writes. “As crazy as it sounds, I suddenly had the feeling that, in the blink of an eye, the president-elect was trying to make us all part of the same family and that Team Trump had made it a ‘thing of ours.’”
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