OPINION:
On the campaign trail, President Trump was nearly assassinated twice. That didn’t stop former FBI Director James B. Comey from posting a cryptic “8647” message, written in seashells, on X last week. A generous interpretation of the message is that Mr. Comey wants Mr. Trump to be taken “off the menu.” The colloquial interpretation is that he was calling for the execution of Mr. Trump.
On Friday, the Secret Service interrogated Mr. Comey for 70 minutes as part of an “ongoing investigation.” Attorney General Pam Bondi will decide whether to bring charges.
Hours after posting the message on social media and after immense backlash, Mr. Comey said, “It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down.”
Yet Mr. Comey was well aware of the violence his posting could incite.
Last year, Mr. Comey predicted in an interview with British-based Times Radio that in the U.S., “there is significant risk that threats will continue to be aimed at individual public servants and that disturbed individuals will act on those threats and harm poll workers or council people or elected officials. That is a very serious thing that has to be taken seriously.”
So why would Mr. Comey, who holds a law degree from the University of Chicago and served as America’s top cop for five years, tweet such a thing? Most likely because he wants publicity for a book tour. His new crime novel, “FDR Drive,” is about far-right provocateurs using America’s free speech rights as a way to incite political violence. Mr. Comey’s tweet was classic projection: doing exactly what he believes the far right can do.
Mr. Comey is a grade-A narcissist. He feeds off the left’s adulation and rose to stardom after accusing Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign of colluding with Russia to win the election.
Mr. Comey vigorously pursued the bogus Steele dossier even though FBI staff raised concerns about its validity. He used the subsequent FBI Crossfire Hurricane investigation to intimidate Mr. Trump in his first term. After he was fired by Mr. Trump in 2017, Mr. Comey leaked a classified memo of one of his briefings with Mr. Trump to prompt a special counsel investigation of the now-debunked Russia-collusion accusations, which led to Mr. Trump’s first failed impeachment proceedings.
“I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible, but I don’t know,” Mr. Comey told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in his first interview after being fired, perpetuating the lie that the Kremlin could control Mr. Trump through sexual blackmail.
Yet Mr. Comey did know. He knew when he sat down with Mr. Stephanopoulos that the Steele dossier, the basis of his accusations, was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and was likely fiction.
Mr. Comey’s maniacal pursuit of discrediting Mr. Trump’s first term in office made him a hero of the left. In 2018, his autobiography, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” sold 600,000 copies in its first week and became a two-part miniseries aired on Showtime. He became a talk show darling, inking a contributor deal on CNN and subsequently appearing numerous times on MSNBC.
Last May, after Mr. Trump was prosecuted by Alvin Bragg and convicted in New York on 34 counts of repeatedly and fraudulently falsifying business records, Mr. Comey, with former White House press secretary Jen Psaki on her MSNBC show, lustfully imagined Mr. Trump behind bars.
Asked whether it was logistically impossible to lock up a former president, complete with Secret Service protection, Mr. Comey responded: “No. They would just put him in a double-wide somewhere out near the fence, out in the grass. He’d eat there, he’d shower there, he’d exercise there. He’d be away … from general population. … It’s obviously doable.”
To this day, Mr. Comey hasn’t faced any accountability for misleading Congress under oath, leaking classified memos to the press, illegally surveilling the 2016 Trump campaign, letting Mrs. Clinton off the hook for destroying government emails, and undermining a sitting president.
Yet justice may be coming.
In an interview Sunday with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino said they had uncovered new “Russiagate” documents and information deliberately hidden by prior FBI leadership.
“We have now found material and information and people who wanted to hide it from the world since we got in these seats,” Mr. Patel said. “We’re working with Congress to release these documents unredacted. That’s how you restore trust. …
“Just give us about a week or two,” Mr. Patel told Ms. Bartiromo. “The FBI was the most storied law enforcement institution, and it will be again very soon. But first, we must have full accountability. Justice is coming.”
Justice, nine years in the making.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
Correction: A previous version of the column incorrectly noted the number of counts that Mr. Trump faced last May. He was convicted in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records.
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