On Sunday evening, former FBI director James Comey gave a much-anticipated interview to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos as part of the promotion for his upcoming book, A Higher Loyalty, and everyone was eager to see if Comey would finally divulge damning information about his time spent working with the Trump administration.
In the interview, Comey discusses Trump, the Mueller investigation, the 2016 election, some recollections of his childhood, and even mentions the rumored “pee tape” (don’t get too excited, he doesn’t know if it exists). With so much to cover, it’s not surprising that ABC had to edit down the original interview from five hours to one hour.
During the interview, however, Stephanopoulos touched on a topic which has engrossed many Americans as of late: the possible (albeit unlikely) impeachment of Donald Trump. When asked for his opinion on the matter, Comey gave a surprising answer.
“I’ll give you a strange answer,” Comey replied. “I hope not because I think impeaching and removing Donald Trump from office would let the American people off the hook and have something happen indirectly that I believe they’re duty bound to do directly.”
However, Comey does believe that, if Americans are unhappy with the current presidential regime, they should “stand up and go to the voting booth and vote their values” during election years rather than impeaching someone they themselves elected.
“We’ll fight about guns,” he added. “We’ll fight about taxes. We’ll fight about all those other things down the road. But you cannot have, as president of the United States, someone who does not reflect the values that I believe Republicans treasure and Democrats treasure and Independents treasure. That is the core of this country. That’s our foundation. And so impeachment, in a way, would short-circuit that.”
As someone who was fired by Trump, you’d think Comey would be eager to see Trump “fired” by the American people. (Plus, it would be such a poetic throwback to his days on The Apprentice.) However, Comey’s answer also reminds us all that we have a personal responsibility when choosing our representatives — and that, if we choose to vote out of spite, we can’t be surprised if we subsequently get less than stellar results.
“As a citizen, I think we owe it to each other to get off the couch and think about what unites us.”