FIGHTING BACK

Kellyanne Conway: I Was Just Joking When I Said James Comey ‘Swung an Election’

Top Trump counselor says the former FBI chief is engaging in a “revisionist version of history.”

In an interview with Good Morning America Monday, senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway turned heads when she said former FBI Director James Comey “swung an election” with the actions he took in 2016. The remarks appeared to undercut a main talking point pushed by Conway’s boss, President Donald Trump, that Hillary Clinton lost on her own incompetence as a candidate. And moments after the interview aired, Conway told The Daily Beast that she was being tongue-in-cheek. “I rolled my eyes and said ‘Really, this guy swung an election?’ It was sarcastic,” she said. Elsewhere in the interview, Conway accused Comey of being motivated by politics and love of power. She said he “struggled to answer basic questions and he looked a little shaky” in the 20/20 interview pegged to his new book, A Higher Loyalty. When George Stephanopoulos told Conway that Comey took Trump’s comment calling Michael Flynn “a good guy” to be “directions” to drop the investigation, she replied that Comey did nothing about it. “What did he do with it? Did he run out and tell the attorney general, ‘Please come in here, I feel uncomfortable?’” Conway said. “This man loved being in the proximity of power... until he got fired and wrote a book.” When asked if she knew what President Trump thought of the interview, she said: “The president is very confounded that this person is always able to divert the spotlight to him... He was a very deft way of making things about him.”

— Sam Stein and Julia Arciga