President Trump reportedly told former FBI Director James Comey that he was considering asking Comey to investigate the infamous “pee tape” in order to prove that the alleged recording — one of the more salacious items in the “Steele dossier” — did not exist.
Comey says in his soon-to-be-released book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” that Trump “brought up what he called the ‘golden showers thing’ … adding that it bothered him if there was ‘even a one percent chance’ his wife, Melania, thought it was true,” The New York Post reported on Thursday.
The conversation allegedly came during the same January 2017 private dinner conversation in which Trump told Comey he expected “loyalty.”
{mosads}The “golden showers” allegation, which first surfaced in the unverified dossier created by former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, claims Trump ordered two prostitutes to urinate on a bed once used by the Obamas at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton.
According to The Washington Post, Trump repeatedly denied the allegations in conversations with Comey, and said that he didn’t like how the claims affected the first lady.
“I’m a germaphobe,” Trump told him in a phone call on Jan. 11, 2017, according to the book. “There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.”
Trump reportedly added that he wanted to “lift the cloud” of suspicion Melania Trump felt over the claims.
“He just rolled on, unprompted, explaining why it couldn’t possibly be true, ending by saying he was thinking of asking me to investigate the allegation to prove it was a lie,” Comey writes, according to The Post. “I said it was up to him.”
Comey reportedly warned the president that such a probe might “create a narrative that we were investigating him personally,” to which Trump agreed, but said they should both consider the idea.
Trump fired Comey as the head of the FBI in May, setting off a chain of events that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.
Comey writes that he wondered privately why the first lady would even consider the possibility that the “pee tape” could be real.
“In what kind of marriage, to what kind of man, does a spouse conclude there is only a 99 percent chance her husband didn’t do that?” he writes in “Higher Loyalty.”
The book hits shelves on Tuesday.