In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

It turns out that James Comey's strange video on Taylor Swift is just the tip of an iceberg. Julie Kelly has looked at all his Substack posts . These began in May. Clad in business attire and wearing some sort of white make up to conceal a persistent puffy-eye problem, Comey gives scripted performances in a cloying uptalk cadence to answer his critics in a carefree way to sound like he isn’t worried about potential legal consequences for what he did. He talks a lot about “love” and “laughter” and finding “peace” in the second era of Trump—quickly leading the viewer to believe Comey actually has very little love, laughter, or peace in his life. (A well-earned miserable existence if that’s indeed the case.) One big question is how he has the time to do this stuff -- making videos is actually time-consuming work. Keep in mind that he started as an associate at a white-shoe law firm and went on to climb the ranks as an associate US Attorney, a US Attorney, Deputy Attorney G...

🚨 BREAKING: Pam Bondi and Kash Patel have just appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as CO-DEPUTY DIRECTOR of the FBI, alongside Dan Bongino, per Fox. pic.twitter.com/XkIdqM8hf5 — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 18, 2025 A couple of intriguing stories come from the FBI this morning. First is the move of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to become something called a "Co-Deputy Director" of the FBI, alongside the up-to-now not-Co-Deputy Director Dan Bongino. The replies to the X post are predictable; this is either a sign that Bongino is on his way out or a sign that Bondi and Patel need someone with prosecutorial experience who can lead a complex investigation. There is no reason both can't be true. My view all along has been that Bongino bought his ticket back home when he walked off the job last month over Pam Bondi's handling of the "Epstein files". Since then, William Barr has echoed Ghislaine Maxwell in saying there's...

So the weekend's big news is that James Comey has outed hinself as a Swiftie , which is to say a fan of Taylor Swift. I just haven't been following this phenomenon, and I did some quick research to bring myself up to date. Accoreding to Wikipedia , Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. Her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions have made her a cultural icon of the 21st century. She is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time. I watched a couple of her routines on YouTube, and on one hand, they seem like something recycled from the last century, maybe Joni Mitchell meets Madonna, but on the other, although she's 35, an age when the musical greats of my generation were already dead, her persona is more like an angry, disillusioned 14-year-old. This incongruity seems to be the key to why James Comey is a Swiftie, he's from an...

Looking back, the few times I was actually paid directly to do writing, it was government statistical reports and corporate policy manuals. But I got out of those jobs and into more interesting technical work as soon as I could. I saw a piece by John Kass at Real Clear Politic s this morning that showed me why I'm grateful to the Almighty for steering me away from his kind of work. Kass had a 41-year career as a writer for the Chicago Tribune and now freelances. I'd be ashamed to be him. In today's piece: It was Obama who orchestrated the FBI and CIA to create what is now understood as the “Russia Collusion Hoax” and used it in attempts to destroy his political rival President Donald Trump. He set them like attack dogs on the American presidency, to rip it apart after the American people had elected Trump as their president. This may be true, but we're a long, long way from seeing it proven, and to write this sort of stuff now is pure wishful thinking. But he...

Yesterday's post on the new revelations about Sally Yates's role in stopping the FBI investigation into a pay-to-play scheme involving the Clinton Family Foundation and then the effort to get Michael Flynn out of the White House relied mostly on a story at John Solomon's Just the News . I couldn't help thinking this added quite a bit of context to many individual pieces in the whole Russiagate story -- it made me think it all got started as early as 2015 in an effort to secure the nomination for Hillary. Sean Spicer interviewed Solomon yesterday evening on his own podcast (embedded above), separate from the Mark Halperin 2WAY show. Some of the context suggests it was done a day or two before the Just the News story was posted, but it does seem to give a wide-angle view of how Solomon is coming to see Russiagate, that is, that the pee dossier and the Flynn affair are just incidental pieces of a wider and longer-lived scheme. At 1:35, Solomon lays it out: I do have ...

Sally Yates so far has turned up just at the margins of the Russiagate saga. She's surfaced in this post largely as a stand-in for the departed Loretta Lynch during the last days of the Obama administration and the first days of Trump 45. According to Wikipedia , In 2015, she was appointed United States Deputy Attorney General by President Barack Obama. Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on January 20, 2017, Yates served as acting United States Attorney General for 10 days. Trump dismissed Yates for insubordination on January 30, after she instructed the Justice Department not to make legal arguments defending Executive Order 13769, which temporarily banned the admission of refugees and barred travel from certain Muslim-majority countries (later to include North Korea and Venezuela) on the grounds that terrorists were using the U.S. refugee resettlement program to enter the country. . . . Yates st...

The other day, the FBI declassified another 266 pages of documents, and almost nobody seems to have noticed. BREAKING: @FDRLST has obtained the most recent 266-page tranche of declassified FBI documents. Because we believe in the right of the public to access and analyze these documents in their entirety, we are making the entire file available to everybody. Link in comments. pic.twitter.com/uSYjyuw0oF — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 13, 2025 I did my best to scroll through them, but with all the redactions, I couldn't get any sense of continuity. Having no choice, I waited for someone else to begin to make sense of everything, but I didn't begin to see much until this morning. Julie Kelly's take is probably the best -- it gives a good impression of the many interfacing pieces: Lots of the usual suspects—James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Peter Strzok to name a few—are popping up in newly-released documents related to the Russiagate hoax. But references to ...