They've Got To Have Miore On Comey

There was a New York Times story (behind a paywall) that didn't get much attention two weeks ago, but when I ran across it the other day, it had me saying "hmm". The MSNBC story embedded above carries the gist:

The New York Times is reporting former FBI Director James Comey was tracked by the U.S. Secret Service after his “86 47” Instagram post. They tailed Comey in unmarked cars and tracked his cell phone. The DOJ has also opened criminal probes into both Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan as part of a separate investigation. NBC News’ Ken Dilanian, New York Times Investigative Reporter Michael Schmidt and Staff Writer at The Atlantic Ashley Parker join Chris Jansing to discuss.

At 0:51:

So the night that Comey posted that and took it down, he was interviewed by the Secret Service, and he explained to them that he didn't know that the arrangement of the seashells had a violent connotation, and that he had no intention of harming the president. Former Secret Service officials told us that at that point, given who Comey was and that he had no violent history, he was the former head of the FBI, that that would have been the end of any Secret Service investigation. The following day, the Secret Service had Comey and his wife, Patrice, tailed by undercover law enforement authorities, followed him as he drove home through North Carolina and Virginia to his Washington area home. At the same time that the authorities were doing that, they were traacking electronically his phone to understand exactly where he was. And what former Secret Service officials told us is that these are highly invasive tactics that are used only in the most extraordinary of circumstances when they believe there is an active threat to the President of the United States.

The trouble is that Comey is actually a pretty hinky guy. Born in 1960, he was only 57 when Trump fired him as FBI Director in 2017. Normally someone with that resume at that age might go into lucrative private security consulting like Louis Freeh or investigative work for a white-shoe law firm like Robert Mueller. At best, Comey has done low-pay visiting professor work and ghostwritten book deals, which suggests that even left-leaning corporations think he's too untrustworthy to associate with.

Instead, his second career seems mostly to involve being investigated himself. According to The Hill in 2020,

Justice Department officials are investigating a years-old classified Russian intelligence document leak and whether former F.B.I director James Comey was the person who illegally provided reporters with information, The New York Times reports.

The probe is the second time federal officials have a looked into Comey regarding leaked information. The former FBI head has been frequently labeled a “leaker” by President Trump. What makes this investigation abnormal, though, is that federal prosecutors usually investigate leaks when classified information is reported by the press, not years after the fact, the Times reports.

. . . The document that was mentioned reportedly played a large role in Comey announcing in July 2016 the FBI’s decision to not recommend charges for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding her use of a private email server to conduct government business.

. . . According to the Times’s sources, the investigation began in the last couple of months, but why it was initiated and what stage it’s at remains unclear.

Let's keep in mind that almost before the pee dossier was a glimmer in anyone's eye, he'd gotten crosswise with Hillary Clinton. But here's a 2019 story from NBC:

The Department of Justice will not prosecute former FBI director James Comey for leaking memos detailing his interactions with President Donald Trump.

According an Office of the Inspector General report released Thursday, Comey violated DOJ and FBI policies, as well as the FBI's employment agreement, by keeping copies of four of his memos in a personal safe and asking a law professor friend to make one memo public after Trump fired him in May 2017.

. . . The DOJ's internal watchdog, which probed Comey's handling of the sensitive documents, found that Comey's friend leaked the contents of the memo to a reporter from The New York Times, but that it did not contain classified information. Comey shared all four memos with his private attorneys after his firing without alerting the FBI, the report said — another violation of policy — and one contained information classified at the Confidential level, which is the lowest level.

If you think about it, the FBI's own file on Comey must be something close to the size of its files on Martin Luther King or the Berrigans. So I'm not sure why the "former Secret Service officials" in the New York Times story would suggerst that Comey is some sort of model citizen who would never think of harming the president. To the contrary, he has a pretty clear record of unreliability and breaking the rules, and it looks very much like no reputable employer will touch him in any sort of high-porofile role.

In fact, it almost looks to me as though the tactics the Secret Service apparently used with Comey after the 8647 incident were deliberately intended to give him the impression that he was under serious scrutiny to see who else he contacted. If they were tracking his phone, they were tracking his phone, after all. And I'll bet this paid off. My guess is that among other things, it got him to talk with his daughter Maurene, and together, they cooked up a leak of the Epstein birthday book to the Wall Street Journal.

My guess is there's a lot more to this than meets the eye, and James Comey isn't very smart. I'll stay tuned.