James Comey didn’t change many minds on the set of “Morning Joe.” On Monday, the show regulars gathered and mostly dismissed the former FBI director’s hour-long ABC interview on Sunday evening.
“One of the unfortunate things of all of this is that it’s happening. There’s enough of a circus now” said Council on Foreign Relations chief Richard Haass. “This was self-interest, not national interest.”
Haass also suggested that Comey’s justification for his interventions in the 2016 election were “intellectually unmoored.”
“One of the biggest contradictions was when he said it would have been brutally unfair for him to have brought to the American public attention the fact that Donald Trump’s campaign was also under investigation for ties to Russia because he didn’t know if there was anything there,” offered NBC News reporter Heidi Przybyla.
“Well, what was his decision days before the election to bring to the American people the fact that there was Anthony Weiner’s laptop which also by the way they had no idea if there was anything there, any kind of information that was worth anything.”
To that point, Joe Scarborough capped it off saying that while Comey may have been in a bind, reopening the Clinton email investigation days before the election could have been handled more artfully.
“If he would have just said something like, ‘I am notifying Congress only because I am required to do so by prior agreement, however, no one should draw any conclusions from this letter, it is simply a notification,’” said Scarborough. “He didn’t do that.”
On Sunday, Comey kicked off what will be a week-long media blitz to promote his new book, “A Higher Loyalty.” The hour-long ABC special with George Stephanopoulos received mixed reviews Monday morning.