So Trump invited Comey over for dinner this one time. Comey didn’t want to go but didn’t think he could say no, so he went. It was a week after the inauguration.

As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him.

Sly. That wasn’t the two of them making small talk. It was Trump boring on about his Crowd Size and Comey swallowing the urge to tell him to grow up.

Then Trump made a wholly inappropriate demand for “loyalty,” as if Comey were his personal assistant.

Mr. Comey declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others, he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not “reliable” in the conventional political sense.

And in that job he’s not supposed to be “reliable” in that sense.

The White House says this account is not correct.

The White House puts out whatever lies Trump tells it to put out…and then watches as Trump contradicts the lies hours later.

Mr. Trump, in an interview on Thursday with NBC, described a far different dinner conversation with Mr. Comey in which the director asked to have the meeting and the question of loyalty never came up. It was not clear whether he was talking about the same meal, but they are believed to have had only one dinner together.

Trump is a fabulist. He makes shit up. You can’t trust a single word he says.

A businessman and reality television star who never served in public office, Mr. Trump may not have understood that by tradition, F.B.I. directors are not supposed to be political loyalists, which is why Congress in the 1970s passed a law giving them 10-year terms to make them independent of the president.

Mr. Comey described details of his refusal to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump to several people close to him on the condition that they not discuss it publicly while he was F.B.I. director. But now that Mr. Comey has been fired, they felt free to discuss it on the condition of anonymity.

A White House spokeswoman on Thursday disputed the description of the dinner by Mr. Comey’s associates.

“We don’t believe this to be an accurate account,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary. “The integrity of our law enforcement agencies and their leadership is of the utmost importance to President Trump. He would never even suggest the expectation of personal loyalty, only loyalty to our country and its great people.”

Oh come on. You can’t possibly expect us to believe that. Trump who puts his ravenous enraged ego on parade on Twitter every day? He would demand loyalty from anyone and everyone.