Meghan McCain attacked former FBI director James Comey moments after he was introduced to the audience on ABC’s The View Wednesday morning.
McCain, the daughter of Senator John McCain (R., Ariz.), chastised the former FBI director — who is on tour promoting his tell-all book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership — for breaking with the longstanding bureau tradition of remaining silent about one’s service.
“I think maybe J. Edgar Hoover is rolling over in his grave at the things you’re revealing,” McCain said Wednesday.
Comey disputed McCain’s characterization of the book as a “tell-all” and emphasized his compliance with FBI confidentiality rules in writing it.
“I don’t think of it as a tell-all. It’s a whole lot more than the stories that are in the last few chapters of the book,” he said. “It’s about mistakes I have made, things I’m very much ashamed of, I did when I was younger. It’s a story about portions of my life to try to tell a story. It has no classified information or sensitive information, and I know that because I wrote it and the FBI reviewed it. Hoover would probably say, ‘You followed the rules.’”
McCain went on to take issue with Comey’s insistence that he doesn’t view himself as a political actor. “You sound like a political commentator to me,” she told the novice author, after he criticized the Republican party for abandoning its core principles.
Reports emerged during the Wednesday morning interview that a group of eleven conservative lawmakers has recommended to Attorney General Jeff Sessions that criminal charges be filed against Comey, Hillary Clinton, former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe, former attorney general Loretta Lynch, and others.
The Republican lawmakers asked that Comey be charged with perjury for making false statements to Congress about the investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information, and accused the remaining officials of similar crimes born out of a desire to shield Clinton in the probe.
“Because we believe that those in positions of high authority should be treated the same as every other American, we want to be sure that the potential violations of law outlined below are vetted appropriately,” the lawmakers wrote.