James Comey just needs your attention

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?”