MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump chats with Vladimir Putin on November 11, 2017.
- President Donald Trump "brought up the 'Golden Showers thing'" during a conversation he had with former FBI director James Comey, according to a leaked copy of Comey's memos published on Thursday.
- The "golden showers" Trump referred to stemmed from a rumor that Trump had entertained prostitutes and witnessed a sexual act while in a Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel room in 2013.
- According to Comey, Trump said that 'the hookers thing' is nonsense, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin told him that "'we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.'"
President Donald Trump "brought up the 'Golden Showers thing'" during a conversation he had with former FBI director James Comey, according to leaked copies of Comey's memos.
The "golden showers" Trump referred to stemmed from a rumor that Trump had entertained prostitutes and witnessed a sexual act while in a Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel room in 2013.
That detail was one of many that emerged on Thursday night, after 15-pages of partially redacted memos that Comey wrote last year were released.
In the memo dated February 8, 2017, Comey wrote that former chief of staff Reince Priebus took him to see Trump in the Oval Office, where they had a conversation on a myriad of different topics, including the anecdote about prostitutes. The as yet unverified rumor is mentioned in the Steele dossier, a collection of memos compiled by the former British spy, Christopher Steele.
"The President said 'the hookers thing' is nonsense," Trump said at the time, according to Comey, "but that Putin had told him 'we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world."
Comey qualified his account and said that Trump "did not say where Putin had told him this ..."
During the conversation, Trump fretted over the notion that his wife, Melania, would be upset by the notion that he could have spent time with prostitutes in Moscow, and reiterated his claim that "he hadn't stayed overnight in Russia," to which Priebus tried to interject by asking "why it was even in there," Comey wrote.
In his new book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership," Comey said that he privately thought why Melania might believe the allegation against Trump would even remotely be true.
"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," Comey wrote in the book.
Some of the allegations mentioned in the Steele dossier have not been publicly verified. The document is one of several pieces of information being considered in the Russia investigation that spans several US congressional committees and law-enforcement agencies.