Former FBI Director James Comey is about to return to the national spotlight with the release of his memoir next week — but the White House is doing little to prepare for the onslaught, according to two officials.

These officials said it’s understood within the West Wing that laying out an advance media strategy is largely a futile exercise since President Donald Trump could blow up any prepared talking points with a single tweet.


Instead, senior aides are hoping Trump’s trip to South America and subsequent summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago will provide a distraction, as well as an opportunity for the president to appear above the fray.

The nitty-gritty of preparing talking points and rapid response is being outsourced to the Republican National Committee, which also handled much of the rebuttal when Comey testified on Capitol Hill in June. There is no blitz attack planned by the White House, which would be seen as “punching down,” according to one of the White House officials.

An RNC official confirmed that the group is preparing a Comey response but declined to provide details or say how many people are involved in the effort.

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Experienced Washington hands say taking a reactive position, rather than preparing to go on offense, is a risky move given the anticipation surrounding Comey’s book.

“The White House should recognize this will be a No. 1 nationwide best-seller. They cannot talk it off the best-seller list,” said former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer. “Nothing they do will increase sales for it; they’ll already be sky high. That ship’s sailed. This book is selling, so there’s merit in responding and no downside in responding.”

“This is just so red hot, the White House must respond itself, along with surrogates, but they can’t just rely on surrogates,” he added.

Aside from congressional testimony and a few oblique tweets, Comey has largely remained silent about Trump’s decision to fire him in May 2017. That move triggered the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller — who is exploring whether the firing itself was an attempt by Trump or others around him to obstruct justice.

Comey’s book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” is already near the top of the best-seller list on Amazon, although it’s been been closely guarded by publisher Flatiron Books ahead of its April 17 release. Flatiron said there are no plans to release advance excerpts, a strategy that helped ignite interest in Michael Wolff’s tell-all, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”

Comey is preparing a media blitz around the release that will last more than two weeks. There will be an hourlong prime-time interview on ABC on April 15, an appearance on ABC’s "The View" on April 18, a live interview with CNN on April 19, an MSNBC interview later that day, an appearance on Fox News on April 26, and a "PBS NewsHour" interview on April 30.

His national book tour will run for more than a month, from April 18 to May 25, with stops in New York City; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; San Francisco; Boston; Washington; Miami; Los Angeles; and Kansas City, Missouri.

The schedule will keep Comey in the news — and on Trump’s mind — for weeks after the book is released.

“It’s just going to be another cross this comms and press shop has to bear when it comes to really, really shitty stories,” said one former White House official.

Scathing, scandalous memoirs by former administration officials are as much a Washington tradition as the cherry blossoms. George Stephanopoulos’ 1999 “All Too Human” cast an unflattering light on President Bill Clinton. Scott McClellan, George W. Bush’s press secretary from 2003-2006, famously pilloried his former boss and colleagues in a 2008 memoir, prompting the Bush White House to dismiss him as “disgruntled.”

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates hit the Barack Obama White House in his 2014 memoir, “Duty,” for its “controlling nature” and “its determination to take credit for every good thing that happened while giving none to the people in the Cabinet departments — in the trenches — who had actually done the work.” He famously wrote that then-Vice President Joe Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Wolff’s book, largely a political drama, prompted a public break between Trump and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who was ousted from his leadership of Breitbart News over scathing comments he made to Wolff about Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., and son-in-law Jared Kushner — including about the decision to fire Comey, which Bannon opposed.

But the Comey book raises the stakes beyond mere palace intrigue, policy disagreements and gossipy back-biting. Trump’s firing of Comey, and repeated attacks on him since, have discomfited some Republicans and raised questions about whether Trump attempted to block the Russia probe. How he reacts to Comey’s book, and whatever new revelations it might contain, could frustrate aides’ attempts to keep Trump from inserting his voice in the Russia probe.

“It’s going to be something more damaging,” said the former Trump White House official. “Jim Comey is someone who is extremely dramatic, and he’s an extremely good storyteller. He’s someone who can drive a narrative and keep the camera’s interest.”

Trump’s antipathy for Comey is well-documented. He has at turns accused him of lying, leaking, rigging the Hillary Clinton email investigation and leaving the FBI’s reputation in “tatters.”

Comey has welcomed the fight.

“Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not,” Comey wrote on March 17 on Twitter, where he has nearly 1 million followers.

Republicans aren’t the only ones wary of the release. Comey was central to the investigation into Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and his handling of that affair — which included an unprecedented level of public disclosure in the immediate run-up to the 2016 election — has made him a vilified figure in the Clinton camp.

Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton, said the thought of the forthcoming book made him “mildly nauseous” — a nod to Comey’s statement last year, before he was fired, about how suggestions that he’d affected the election made him feel.

Merrill said no specific response strategy is in the works but that he, Clinton ally Philippe Reines and others “won’t be bashful about going on TV to talk about it.”

But Fleischer noted that Comey is a difficult target for critics, because he’s “somebody who the press corps has looked at largely as a saint.”

The aim for Trump and his team, Fleischer said, should be to exploit any weaknesses Comey has.

“Inevitably, there is a mistake in a book, an admission of wrongdoing in a book, an Achilles' heel in a book, and that’s what the White House is going to want to focus on,” Fleischer said. “For example, the role Comey played in the 2016 election. That is a very legitimate issue on which Comey is weak. And that’s something the White House could talk about. His investigation of Hillary, that’s something the White House could talk about.”

