Heilemann: Comey Is Trying to ‘Cast Himself’ as the ‘Hero of the Resistance’

Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” political analyst John Heilemann said former FBI Director James Comey’s interview with ABC’s “20/20” was an attempt to cast himself as “the hero of the resistance” to President Donald Trump.

Heilemann said, “The interesting thing about that is that Comey comes into this moment as sort of a man without a country, right? Democrats are unhappy in 2016 for having supposedly taken the election away from Hillary Clinton. Republicans are now unhappy with him. He doesn’t have a natural constituency.”

He added, “What I want to say about Comey is that he’s now in the business of selling books. That’s what he’s doing. He’s going out to sell a book that’s going to be number one on ‘The New York Times’ bestseller list. He wants to sell a million books. He’s in the book marketing business. And if you’re Jim Comey and know you don’t have a natural constituency with either the liberals or the conservatives, I feel like he made a choice. He’s going out, and he’s basically decided I’m going to decide I’m going to be the hero of the resistance. I’m going to attack Trump in this language you’re talking about. I’m going to have my wife on ABC last night provided video of how she was at the Women’s March, and he talked about his wife and daughter being supporters of the Hillary Clinton. He tried to cast himself last night — if he had to make a choice, he wanted to say, ‘Here is why what I did to Hillary Clinton wasn’t so bad, guys. Trust me, my wife and daughter are big fans of Hillary Clinton. I’m going to basically rhetorically put myself in a position where I got to claim a country. The country I’ll be on is the anti-Trump liberal side of the aisle. That’s who I’ll try to sell these books to.”

(h/t Grabien)

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

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