James Comey Is Better Than You And He Is Never Wrong

Just you remember that

May 20, 2025

James Comey dismisses the criticism directed at him with his normal emo aplomb.

In his first public remarks since sharing an image of seashells arranged on a beach to form the numbers “86 47,” Comey told MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace he found it “hard to have regret” over the post that he still believes looks “totally innocent” — saying it was “crazy” that anyone would see it as a call for violence.
“I don’t know how we ended up here,” the ex-FBI chief said of the commotion that got him on the Secret Service’s radar. “It never occurred to me it was any kind of controversial thing, but that’s the time we live in.”
Comey explained that when he saw the shell formation on the beach, he believed it was “some kind of political message” regarding the 47th president, and his wife encouraged him to photograph it.
“We stood over it and I said, ‘I think it’s some kind of political message,’ and she said, ‘”86″ when I was a server’ — she did a lot of working in restaurants — ‘meant to remove an item from the menu when you ran out of ingredients,’” Comey said. “And I said, ‘Well, to me, as a kid, it always meant to leave a place, to ditch a place.’ I said, ‘That’s really clever.’”

ICYMI, here was my take over the weekend in The Spectator:

Let’s sit down and have a talk about James Comey, America’s tallest teenage girl. Typically the conversation around the nation’s most famous former FBI director focuses on political gripes – whether his grandstanding, poorly timed announcements that Democrats still blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss, or his back-channeling conniving debriefings Republicans still blame for Russiagate. But nowadays, whenever Comey pops up in the algorithm, it seems to be because he’s just so deeply weird.
His latest debacle: a social media posting of seashells spelling out “86 47”, a threat which prompted immediate controversy which Comey attempted to brush off as naivete. “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 said. House Republicans, buying none of it, introduced a resolution condemning him – and the Secret Service, which is obligated to investigate anything like this (even from a former head of the FBI), brought Comey in for questioning.
For his part, the President told Bret Baier that he thought the Secret Service response was appropriate, and the message was “loud and clear”:
“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… 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.”
This is just the latest of Comey’s many politicized incidents of Mean Girls level social activity, all the way back to when he had to admit to owning a burner account on Twitter that it took the hardened sleuths at Gawker just four hours to find. Since then, he’s carefully cultivated his social media presence to feature pictures of him pensively staring into the middle distance at trees and farmland, or posting performative displays of pro-trans garb.
Why the swerve by a 64-year-old into high school-level influencer sludge? Perhaps it’s that this Episcopalian contains multitudes. The fact that Comey, supposed ramrod straight dutiful Eagle Scout of a public servant, moved so quickly to profit greatly from his tenure – first via a multimillion-dollar book deal (it sold more than 600,000 copies in its first week), then from consultation with Showtime on a four-hour on-screen adaptation starring Jeff Daniels (reviews were mediocre), and today via six-figure speaking fees (his focus is on “ethics”) – effectively transformed him into just a higher class of grifter, playing to the same Donald Trump hate set funding the likes of Jennifer Rubin, Norm Eisen and Molly Jong-Fast.
Yet the weirdness comes from more than just the aggressive profit motive. On the one hand, this is a figure who worked the press to cultivate an image of the incorruptible G-man. But time and time again, it turned out he was playing the room. He was forced to admit under oath that he leaked notes of a private conversation with then-President Trump to the New York Times. His endorsements of Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024 were viewed as detrimental to their campaigns, not boosts. And the last time he showed up in the news, it was for being publicly excoriated by one of his most prominent prior victims, Martha Stewart, in a popular Netflix documentary where she wishes he and his fellow prosecutors were “put in a Cuisinart and turned on high.”
Of course, if you understand the world through the lens of a teenaged girl, this is all going swimmingly. There’s no such thing as bad publicity for James Comey. All it took was some carefully arranged seashells to get people talking about him again! And wouldn’t you know it, lo and behold, he’s got a brand new book out just next week – the latest in his Nora Carleton fiction series, this time pitting the brave New York City prosecutor against “far right extremism powered by internet demagogues and funded by shadowy organizations” who intend to target the United Nations.
Maybe James Comey isn’t complicated after all. He just wants our attention. As the poet David Budbill wrote: “I want to be famous so I can be humble about being famous. What good is my humility when I am stuck in this obscurity?”

Will Patel + Bongino Silence Epstein Theories?

Probably not.

Few people can claim the mantle of being more identified with the anti-Deep State MAGA movement than Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the Director and Deputy Director of the FBI, who sat down for a lengthy conversation with Maria Bartiromo this weekend. Yet they responded with surprisingly out of character language to the continued conspiracizing around the death of Jeffrey Epstein – the New York financier – and the possibility of a wider plot to assassinate Donald Trump.
If anyone was going to reveal hidden secrets of the Deep State, it would be these two, who have railed against its excesses on media platforms for years before taking their posts. But that’s not what they did: “As someone who has worked as a public defender, as a prosecutor who’s been in that prison system, who’s been in the Metropolitan Detention Center, who’s been in segregated housing, you know a suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was,” Patel said when questioned about Epstein’s death. He added that those who disagree with him “have a right to their opinion.”

“He killed himself,” Bongino added, “I’ve seen the whole file, he killed himself.”

As for the motives and details related to the attempt on Trump’s life by the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania, Bongino was even more definitive in declaring there’s nothing explosive hidden behind the curtain: “We’ve been personally briefed extensively on every single detail, nugget, tendril of this case. One is actively in court right now, so out of respect for the case, it’s probably more appropriate that I stay quiet on that.
“However, I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth, and whether you like it or not is up to you. If there was a big, explosive there, right, given my history as a Secret Service agent and my personal friendship, as a director does, with the President, give me one logical, sensible reason we would not have – if you can think of one, there isn’t. In some of these cases, the ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there. And I know people – I get it, I understand. It’s not there. If it was there, we would have told you.”

Bongino is right to say he’s not telling people on the right what they want to hear – that there is some deeper grand conspiracy that ended Epstein’s life or motivated the Butler shooter. But will they listen? Even with the public promises from Trump’s handpicked anti-Deep State warriors, it seems doubtful that any of the rabbit holes of conspiracy around these events will dissipate. Instead, expect those who invested so much in these narratives to stick with their nature, and suggest that the pair were never the champions of transparency they claimed to be – or even worse, that they’re compromised. Some people just want to believe.

Concern Rises Around Winsome Sears

Politico:

Virginia Republicans are bracing for November with a growing sense of doom.
The GOP already faced a tough climate in this year’s elections thanks to tech billionaire Elon Musk’s war on the state’s robust federal workforce. Then came a bitter, intraparty feud over Republicans’ lieutenant governor candidate. Now, some Republicans are privately expressing concerns about the viability of their gubernatorial nominee, Winsome Earle-Sears.
“With the demographics of Richmond, in an off year with the Republican White House, it’s going to be tough,” said longtime Virginia Republican strategist Jimmy Keady. “To be a Republican to win in Virginia, you have to run a very good campaign. You’ve got to have [tailwinds] and the Democratic candidate’s got to make a mistake.”
Virginia Republicans always knew this would be a challenging election year. In the gubernatorial race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger is a well-positioned candidate with a record of winning competitive races.
But Virginia Republicans are growing increasingly worried about Earle-Sears’ slow start to the campaign. According to nearly a dozen Republican strategists and officials in the state, her sluggish fundraising, a controversial speech in which she compared Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs to slavery and her frosty relationship with MAGA rising star John Reid, who is running for lieutenant governor, could make a bad year worse.
“A lot of us are looking at it and saying, ‘I’d do it differently,’” said a senior GOP staffer granted anonymity to speak freely. “She’s a good person, she’d make a good governor, and she’s just not as strong of a candidate as we’d like to have.”

How Trump Beat Columbia

NY Mag:

A dynamic of parallel realities took hold. Pro-Palestinian groups felt that Shafik was so exclusively pro-Israel that she wouldn’t even mention their cause in letters that referenced, obliquely, “violence that is affecting so many people.” “We feel deeply hurt by your one-sided University-wide emails that left us feeling excluded from our own university,” students wrote her. The same week, a zealously pro-Israel business-school professor, Shai Davidai, burst on the scene with a viral speech condemning Shafik as a “coward” for not standing up to “pro-terror” forces on campus.
One way to understand this contradiction is ineptness. Columbia was taking action, but many of those actions were inadequate and poorly communicated, and so the people they were intended to reach were either not aware or not impressed, while the other side could point to the moves as proof of support for the enemy. One example involves doxing. A truck circled campus displaying pro-Palestinian students’ names and faces under the heading COLUMBIA’S LEADING ANTISEMITES, and one of its targets wrote to a dean: “I truly cannot even wrap my head around how careless the entire school is about the situation. I have been making calls, sending emails, finding new contacts for help nonstop and am yet to hear anything from Columbia. As an Arab and Muslim student, I know I’m not the priority here.” Within a week, Columbia created a Doxing Resource Group, but students who tried to contact it found their messages weren’t going through. One student waited 15 days for a response.
Shafik held regular listening sessions with students, but many Columbians considered her walled off and unreachable. She seemed isolated, too, at the administrative level. Shafik had not brought a team of loyal staff from her old job, and throughout the never-ending uproar, she was still hiring for core positions. She selected a chief operating officer and provost in January 2024. One source of candid advice was the regular gatherings of an “Ivy plus” presidents group, which one participant described as part strategy session, part group therapy. They met in person once a month at the Penn Club in midtown and every Sunday via Zoom when the crisis ran especially hot.
Early on, Shafik had been lucky to dodge a congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reports of antisemitism in lawyerly terms and later resigned. But it meant that when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce returned to the issue, it held a hearing focused exclusively on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, before they arrived on Capitol Hill, they learned that pro-Palestinian students had taken over the university’s South Lawn.
In the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was lost and Columbia plunged into true crisis, never to recover. During the hearing, Shafik struck a far different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Gay. She agreed that antisemitism was a major problem at Columbia and discussed disciplinary actions against specific professors without reservation. If this placated congressional Republicans for a nanosecond, it permanently lost whatever goodwill she had left with the Columbia rank and file. As a member of the faculty later put it to me, “A couple other Ivy presidents went to Congress and lost their job. Shafik went to Congress and lost a university.”