Remember James Comey, the former FBI director, who presented the so-called Steele dossier to President Trump, and then that dossier just happened to leak into public view?
That dossier suggested President Trump wasn’t just a Russian cat’s paw, it claimed he was actually having affairs with prostitutes in Moscow and doing all sorts of crazy stuff.
Comey presented that to Trump, and then, magically, it just happened to emerge in the press very soon after.
Comey was also the FBI director who let Hillary Clinton off the hook for the mishandling of classified documents — a precedent that would then be used for every subsequent president so they could mishandle classified documents. He deliberately misread a statute to let Hillary Clinton off the hook.
But then, just before the 2016 election, he announced that there would be a further investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information, leading Democrats to believe that he threw the election to Donald Trump.
Needless to say, he was a terrible FBI director, from soup to nuts. Then, in his post-FBI director career, he decided to become a giant weirdo who wandered around forests.
I’m not kidding. That’s what he does.
He is the world’s worst Instagram influencer.
James Comey is a person who likes to stand in random places and take contemplative pictures of the things around him and then post them.
So why is James Comey relevant? Because on Thursday, he put up a post on his Instagram, and it was another one of these contemplative posts or would-be contemplative posts.
Except this one got him in a little bit of trouble.
He wrote on Instagram, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” accompanied by a photo of shells arranged to read 86 47.
Now, you might be thinking, “What are we watching? Lost? What do these numbers mean? Why are these numbers important?”
And then you realize, “Wait a moment, 47 would be Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States, and the number 86 could mean a couple of things. Originally, to “86” someone meant to throw them out of a bar or restaurant or to cancel a password. It’s sort of like the expression “deep six.”
But there’s another meaning: to kill. To kill the president. Not to get rid of the president, but to kill him.
The second meaning is how the Secret Service interpreted it. They said you are not allowed to threaten the president in public media. That is a violation of the U.S code.
The entire White House came down on Comey.
Taylor Rutledge the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, wrote on X, “While President Trump is currently on an international trip to the Middle East, the former FBI Director puts out what can clearly be interpreted as ‘a hit’ on the sitting President of the United States—a message etched in the sand. This is deeply concerning to all of us and is being taken seriously.”
Donald Trump Jr. signed in to say, “Just James Comey casually calling for my dad to be murdered.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ripped into Comey, saying, “Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey just called for the assassination of President Trump.
DHS and Secret Service are investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.” Trump’s top advisor, Stephen Miller, added, “As the former FBI director, and key leader of the deep state, Comey’s call for assassination — while the president is abroad no less — is a chilling escalation of the war against our democracy by a faction committed to its destruction.”
Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, didn’t want to get lost in the shuffle, so he put out a statement saying, “We are aware of the recent social media post by former FBI Director James Comey, directed at President Trump. We are in communication with the Secret Service and Director Curran. Primary jurisdiction is with SS on these matters and we, the FBI, will provide all necessary support.”
President Trump commented, “He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant ‘assassination.’ And it says it loud and clear. Now, he wasn’t very competent, but he was competent enough to know what that meant. And he did it for a reason. And he was hit so hard because people like me, and they like what’s happening with our country. Our country’s become respected again. … And he’s calling for the assassination of the president. “
“I don’t want to take a position on it, because that’s going to be up to Pam (Bondi) and all of the great people,” Trump continued. “But I will say this: I think it’s a terrible thing. And when you add his history to that, if he had a clean history — he doesn’t, he’s a dirty cop, he’s a dirty cop — and if he had a clean history, I could understand if there was a leniency, but I’m going to let them make that decision.”
When President Trump says “dirty cop,” what he means is that James Comey was presiding over the FBI when the Hillary Clinton Fusion GPS scam document that initiated the entire Russiagate investigation was basically laundered by the Hillary Clinton campaign via the intelligence apparatus to the FBI.
He means all of Russiagate can basically be laid at the feet of James Comey.
Comey apologized, saying, ‘I posted earlier a picture of some shows I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message. I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down.”
He’s claiming ignorance on all this.
A few things right off the bat. First of all, President Trump was nearly assassinated twice last year, so we should take very seriously threats of violence against the president of the United States. He nearly had his head blown off on national TV. And then he was nearly assassinated again by a person who was sitting outside of his golf course in Florida and was waiting for him to get to a particular hole so he could kill him. And then, of course, we know that the Iranians were also attempting to assassinate President Trump.
It’s not as though there is a shortage of threats on the president’s life. We also know that members of the radical Left despise President Trump, and there would be few tears shed by many of those people if, God forbid, something were to happen to President Trump.
So in that sort of climate, what Comey says there is indeed pretty bad. Is it prosecutable? Did Comey actually mean it?
This takes us to the edge of the stupidity versus malice conversation. As I’ve said very frequently, I generally like to attribute people’s motivations when they do something wrong to stupidity rather than malice unless there is solid counter-evidence.
At the very least, what Comey did was incredibly stupid. And James Comey is an incredibly stupid guy. Just recall his tweets standing on a road in the middle of Iowa and standing in a forest.
It isn’t all that hard for me to believe he thought 86 47 meant to get rid of Trump as opposed to killing President Trump.
On the other hand, could he be malicious? Could he hate President Trump enough that he would openly call for that?
You would have to assume at least a level of stupidity where the former FBI director does not know enough about the law to understand that if you openly threaten the president of the United States on social media, the Secret Service is going to come knocking at your door. That would be the truest level of stupidity and malice: to want to kill Trump, but be stupid enough to post it online knowing that he’s probably going to go to jail for it.
That would be the top level of both stupidity and malice. If he were at the top level of malice, then presumably he wouldn’t just post something about it. If he were at the top level of stupidity, he would post something about it and then walk it back.
The bottom line is this with regard to James Comey: Is the Justice Department going to take this very far?
It is certainly true that many of the people who are currently going after James Comey are people who also feel specifically targeted by folks like James Comey, including the current FBI director, Kash Patel.
So it will be fascinating to see exactly how this plays out.
