Former FBI Director James Comey has another op-ed out today, this one describing what it’s like to be attacked publicly by President Donald Trump.
Comey recently made the media rounds after the release of DOJ IG Michael Horowitz’s report, which concluded there was sufficient basis for opening the FBI Russia probe but lambasted the agency for a number of serious errors in the FISA application process. Comey said on Fox News he was wrong and “overconfident” in the FISA process. Trump has publicly ripped Comey many times in the past two years, and tweeted after that interview, “So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail? Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim?”
Today in the Washington Post, Comey expressed his concern about how Trump’s attacks on people in his administration “have interfered with their ability to find work after government service, as even employers who see through the lies fear hiring a ‘controversial person or being attacked themselves.”
He writes that at
The second stage is a kind of numbness, where it doesn’t seem quite real that the so-called Leader of the Free World is assailing you by tweet and voice. It is still unsettling, but it is harder to recapture the vertigo of the first assault.But the longer it goes on, the less it means. In the third stage, the impact diminishes, the power of it shrinks. It no longer feels as though the most powerful human on the planet is after you. It feels as though a strange and slightly sad old guy is yelling at you to get off his lawn, echoed by younger but no less sad people in red hats shouting, “Yeah, get off his lawn!”
Comey ends with a call for American citizens to stand up and “fight through our fatigue and contempt for this shrunken, withered figure.”