James Comey’s book has been for sale for less than 12 hours, and already some in the media have had more than enough of the embattled former FBI director’s publicity tour. He may have just started speaking to the press, but they’re already sick of him.
Yesterday, CNN “conservative” Ana Navarro tweeted that she’d soured on Comey and is tired of his story that his quest is to bring truth and justice to the Trump Administration, since it seems, instead, to be largely about his ego.
Maybe it’s just me…the more I hear from @comey, the more conflicted I feel. I want to believe him that this is all about loyalty to country and inviolable respect for the truth. But damn, the guy has a big ego, is selectively inconsistent. I find him obnoxiously self-righteous.
— Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) April 16, 2018
She’s not the only former Comey cheerleader to make her concerns known. Politico suggested Tuesday that Comey is going about his crusade all wrong, and that Comey’s “white knighthood” is distracting from his story about administration malfeasance.
Of course, Politico is only mildly left-leaning by comparison with other major media outlets. But the thought of Comey being a little too much hasn’t escaped the more traditionally leftist publications either. An op-ed in The Washington Post Tuesday called Comey an “honest man,” but called his memoir a “big mistake” and seemingly “desperate” — an attempt to use an old joke to stay relevant, even as his time in the spotlight has been long over.
Perhaps most shockingly, a condemnation of Comey also appeared in The New York Times, where one writer, Frank Bruni, opined that Comey has become more like his arch-enemy Trump than Comey would care to admit: “[H]e has abetted his own transformation from a crucial witness to a character in the serial drama and nonstop spectacle of Trump’s life.”
None of this is shocking, except that it’s coming so quickly after Comey began his press tour. It took former President Barack Obama years to sour on Comey. Hillary Clinton was still singing his praises until just weeks before her campaign. Even Trump tolerated Comey for several months before giving him the (well-deserved) boot. But everyone eventually found Comey grating and intolerable — the media was just the last to catch up.
