“It never occurred to me that it was any kind of controversial thing, but that’s the kind of time we live in.”
Those are the words of James Brien Comey Jr., former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and someone who’s spent no considerable amount of his life investigating threats on high-profile targets. Those are also the words of a current professional NeverTrumper and hack crime novelist whose latest book — out Tuesday! — deals with a far-right social media personality who law enforcement officials feel “went far beyond the protection of the First Amendment when he singled out his enemies by name and suggested ‘something should be done’ about them,” according to a blurb from Publisher’s Weekly. “His fans have obliged, killing or grievously injuring some of his foes.”
He is also a social media personality himself, taking an interest in nature and life’s great questions:
This guy, I swear pic.twitter.com/yFnWajIQyP
— Aelfred The Great (@aelfred_D) May 15, 2025
Those edibles must have been stronger than advertised. Anyhow, those identities all managed to collide last week in a three-way trainwreck in which Comey posted a picture of seashells in an “86 47” arrangement — an activist slogan, which is chanted to invoke getting rid of Donald Trump, president No. 47; given the lack of potentiality of him being removed from office by constitutional means at this point in time, it either means waiting for his term to end or waiting for his life to end, something a former FBI director should be expected to reasonably intuit.
Just James Comey causally calling for my dad to be murdered.
This is who the Dem-Media worships. Demented!!!! pic.twitter.com/4LUK6crHAT
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 15, 2025
He then posted a subsequent apology in which he said he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” and that the thought “never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.” After a visit from the Secret Service, he’s now doing the predictable non-apology apology appearance (I called the venue four days ago: It was on MSNBC, all right) and marking the whole controversy down to these things:
- He had no idea what this meant.
- It was his wife’s idea, anyway.
- He doesn’t want to be associated with violence of any kind.
- Oh, by the way, he has a book coming out! Did he mention that? “FDR Drive,” due out May 20. Skip that whole Tapper/Thompson exposé on former President Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental condition and pick up your copy at Amazon posthaste!
Was James Comey calling for the death of President Trump?
According to the interview with Comey, he was walking with his wife on the beach “to prepare for this week, which was the launch of my book, and to think about the book and to prepare to answer questions about it.” That’s when they ran across the shell formation, which he thought was cryptic.
“You know, I think it’s some kind of political message,” he realized.
He then recalled that his wife thought “86” meant to take an item off the menu from her days as a restaurant server.
“To me, as a kid [’86’] always meant to leave a place, to ditch a place,” he said, it apparently both dawning on them what it meant.
“I said, ‘That’s really clever.’ So then she said, ‘You should take a picture of that,’ and I did, and then I posted it on my Instagram account and thought nothing more of it.”
Until, of course, people noticed the obvious subtext, and he took it down.
“I heard through her that people were saying it was some sort of a call for assassination, which is crazy,” he said.
“Even if I think it’s crazy” Comey says he took it down because, “I don’t want to be associated with violence of any kind.”
MSNBC: “You are back in the middle of a political firestorm.”
COMEY: “Yeah, for walking on the beach with my wife…” pic.twitter.com/CiRQHNMPvy
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 19, 2025
Now there’s a sign of a real man: “My wife made me do it.”
That’s bad enough if it’s because you didn’t mow the lawn for three weeks and you got spouse-shamed into finally doing what you’re supposed to. However, to go on national television as the former FBI director and swear — as you have a novel coming out about a social media personality who implicitly encourages violence against his political enemies — that his wife came up with the idea to post something that implicitly encourages violence against the one political enemy he’s built the final act of his career around beggars description.
Really, they should have just conducted the interview from the floor, with the top of Comey’s head peeking out from behind the hem of his wife’s flowing peasant skirt as he hid behind her. It would have a much more apt visual metaphor for the spectacle.
In the case of Comey, he has “luck” — if you can call it that — of former Rep. Gary Condit, in that one outrage is trumped (pun unintended) by an even greater one. Condit, you might remember, is the former California congressman who was having an affair with an intern who suddenly disappeared. The nation was riveted throughout the summer of 2001 as to whether an elected official — whose pusillanimity in taking responsibility for the extramarital dalliance at a time when those things were actual scandals led people to believe he might be more than a coward — could possibly be a killer.
As it turns out, that intern was sadly killed by a non-elected official while jogging in Rock Creek Park. However, the potential depredations of Condit were overshadowed by the fact that — as the scandal was unfolding and the hunt for the intern was still on — 9/11 occurred and nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed by terrorists. Condit, very suddenly, became irrelevant.
In Comey’s case, his post — his wife’s idea, honest! — occurred on Thursday. On Friday afternoon, the audio of the infamous interview then-President Joe Biden gave to special counsel Robert Hur in October 2023 finally came out, revealing pauses and slurred speech, which wasn’t in the transcripts and which would have led any sane person who heard it to the conclusion that the man speaking was not mentally well and likely suffering from some form of serious neurological degradation.
On Sunday, two days before that Tapper/Thompson book was set to drop with the most thorough description of how that neurological degradation was hidden from the American public, the office of former President Biden announced he had Stage 4B prostate cancer — not only a stunning admission for a man recently seeking four more years in presidency, but an unusual diagnosis for someone so recently in the Oval Office to suddenly spring upon the nation, given that metastatic prostate cancer takes years to develop, especially in someone Biden’s age, and is easy to detect in someone who is getting regular physical examinations, like any president would be.
In other words, James Comey is suddenly very irrelevant again, a la Gary Condit, which doesn’t make him any less dishonest or cowardly.
Comey is the former director of the FBI, one of the several federal bodies dedicated to detecting violent threats against prominent individuals, implicit or explicit. He knows what the term “86” means — “to ditch” — and knows, as anyone familiar with political reality is, that President Donald Trump will not be ditched for 1,341 more days as of Monday unless he himself expires before his term does. He admits, he knew the statement was political, as well, and he knows that there is no way Trump can run for higher office again.
Unless he can come up with convincing evidence that his wife was running the show while he was at the FBI — much like the wife of the man who replaced him in the headlines was probably doing at the White House — what more do you need to know about this man’s character to grasp the poverty of his judgment?
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