James Comey likes the Democrats, but they don’t seem to like him. It’s sad, really. An unrequited love.
The former FBI director sent the Trump opposition party a love letter this week in the form of a tweet that read, “This Republican Congress has proven incapable of fulfilling the Founders’ design that ‘Ambition must … counteract ambition.’ All who believe in this country’s values must vote for Democrats this fall. Policy differences don’t matter right now. History has its eyes on us.”
A number of Democratic operatives rejected the former FBI director’s heart-song outright. Sad!
“Comey is high on the list of people that I don’t want to hear from today,” said former Obama White House senior adviser and communications director Dan Pfeiffer.
Democratic strategist Zac Petkanas added elsewhere, “Dear [Comey] — We don’t want you. Sincerely, The Democratic Party.”
“Democrats don’t want your endorsement, but thanks,” said Hillary Clinton’s 2016 national press secretary Brian Fallon.
Dartmouth professor and New York Times contributor Brendan Nyhan characterized the rebukes nicely with a tweet that read, “Comey’s instincts are dead wrong every time. Bucks DOJ norms to intervene inappropriately in an election, then further politicizes his firing by endorsing the President’s partisan opponents. Stay out of it!”
Poor Comey. This is how they treat him, even after he said during his book tour that he “can’t be associated” with the GOP any longer. Even after all his resistance-style tweets — including when he wrote after Trump’s disastrous Helsinki press conference that, “This was the day an American president stood on foreign soil next to a murderous lying thug and refused to back his own country. Patriots need to stand up and reject the behavior of this president” — they still don’t want him!
The funny thing is this: The aforementioned responses to Comey’s vote-Democrat tweet are nearly identical to how certain Democrats, including members of the Clinton alumni association, responded in April to the former director’s book tour.
“He should’ve been fired by Barack Obama … not by President Trump,” Lanny Davis, who served as special counsel to former President Bill Clinton, said in April. “It’s about I, I, I, I [with Comey]. It’s only about James Comey. He should’ve been fired.”
Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, John Podesta, said at around the same time, “To some extent it was his arrogance that led him to make a very bad error of judgment. I thought he was an idiot in the context of this election and that it was influential in the outcome, and now we have someone who, as he said, is morally unfit to be the president of the United States.”
Establishment Democrats don’t like him, he’s certainly persona non grata in MAGA-land, and most conservatives don’t seem to care for him either, especially in the wake of his weird and annoying attempts to re-brand himself as a supposedly above-it-all political martyr.
If Comey wants to have a future as a political player, and it seems clear he does following his unceremonious firing from the FBI, he’s going to have to find at least one group that likes him enough to keep him around. Because the way things stand now, there isn’t one.
