President Donald Trump’s vendetta against James Comey risks turning the former FBI director into a martyr, Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough warned.
The former Florida congressman said on Friday morning that the Trump administration’s indictment the night before could make Comey, a target of the president’s attacks for years, “bigger than ever.”
“It bears repeating,” Scarborough said. “You do this, you turn the person you hate into a martyr. You make them bigger than ever. You unite people behind them. Donald Trump understood this in his own political campaign, and yet he’s now making Comey a martyr, a martyr for the rule of law.”
A federal grand jury indicted the one-time FBI director, whom Trump fired in 2017, for allegedly obstructing a congressional investigation and making false statements. The indictment relates to a 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which he allegedly lied about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Comey’s indictment comes after Trump on Saturday ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to come down harder on his political enemies. Comey, seen by the president and his MAGA followers as a leader of what they call the “deep state,” has long fallen into this category.
“Pam,” Trump wrote in an unprecedented Truth Social post. “I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey,’” he said, before adding he believed Comey is “guilty as hell.”
Days later, the new interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, delivered an indictment against Comey after her predecessor resigned, reportedly over failing to do just that. The two-time Miss Colorado entrant is Trump’s former personal lawyer and had only started the job on Monday.
“That will be the first line in his obituary,” Scarborough said of Comey. “Not that he was an FBI director, but that he became a martyr because a president said on social media to an attorney general, ‘Go and arrest this guy,’ for the first time in our lifetime.
“And so now the world looks at James Comey, and they see that he’s a political and a legal martyr. Nobody thought that way yesterday.”
Scarborough’s comments come days after suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel earned record-breaking ratings when he returned to his show Tuesday. The Jimmy Kimmel Live! host was temporarily taken off the air by ABC following comments he made about the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Executives made the call to suspend him after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatened, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
The move was met with bipartisan outrage and seen as an attack on free speech.
Among the critics of Kimmel’s suspension was Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who likened Carr’s comment to a “mafioso” threat.
“Jimmy Kimmel, record numbers,” Scarborough said. “I mean, talk about going viral. It’s extraordinary what Donald Trump did for Jimmy Kimmel’s career and what he has now done for James Comey’s reputation.”
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