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    Trump accuses former FBI director of calling for his killing through coded picture

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    Donald Trump accused the former FBI director James Comey on Friday of calling for his assassination in a coded social media post written in seashells.Comey’s Instagram post – a photograph of seashells on a beach arranged to spell the numbers 8647, which he captioned “Cool shell formation on my beach walk” – was used by rightwing supporters of Trump to claim that it was a call to assassinate the US president. The Secret Service said it has launched an investigation.Comey has said it “never occurred to me” that the numbers represented a coded threat. The number 86 is common slang for stopping or getting rid of something, typically old equipment, or being ejected from an establishment such as a bar, and is often a synonym for “nix”. The number 47 could be understood to indicate Trump, the 47th president.The Secret Service, which is in charge of presidential security and is part of the Department of Homeland Security, interviewed Comey later on Friday as part of an “ongoing investigation”, DHS secretary Kristi Noem confirmed on social media.“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,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News from Abu Dhabi, where he is wrapping up a four-day Middle East trip.Trump claimed Comey “was hit so hard because people like me and they like what’s happening with our country”, adding: “And he’s calling for the assassination of the president.”Comey, who was fired by Trump in 2017 during an investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 election, removed the post hours after it began to draw attention from Trump administration officials and supporters.After taking down the post, Comey said he thought it was a political message but said it did not occur to him that it could have been associated with a call to violence.The exchanges are the latest in an ongoing war over inflamed political rhetoric. Two assassination attempts were made against the president last year, both from people without any clear partisan ideology.The number 86 has also been used by Republicans calling for the impeachment of Joe Biden: for example, T-shirts sold on Amazon read “8646”, indicating a call to impeach Biden (the 46th president).Overheated political rhetoric has long been a subject of controversy. Biden said last July it had been a mistake for him to say “time to put Trump in a bullseye”, days before Saturday’s assassination attempt on his election rival, while Trump has repeatedly used similar language, including suggesting that the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney might not be such a “warhawk” if she had rifles “shooting at her” to see how she felt.A spokesperson for the Secret Service confirmed the agency was “aware of the incident” and said it would “vigorously investigate” any potential threat, but did not offer further details.In a statement, Comey said: “I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.“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.”The post ignited a firestorm on the right.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Disgraced former FBI director James Comey just called for the assassination of POTUS Trump,” the homeland security director, Kristi Noem, wrote on X. “DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.”The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, said his agency would “provide all necessary support” as part of an investigation headed by the Secret Service.Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesperson for the presidential security agency, said on social media that the agency investigates anything that could be taken as a threat. “We are aware of the social media posts by the former FBI Director & we take rhetoric like this very seriously,” he added.Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, said she didn’t buy Comey’s explanation that the message carried no greater meaning. Gabbard said Comey had “just issued a call to action to murder the president of the United States”.“As a former FBI director and someone who spent most of his career prosecuting mobsters and gangsters, he knew exactly what he was doing and must be held accountable under the full force of the law,” Gabbard posted on X.Gabbard later told Fox News that Comey was “issuing a hit” on the president and that “the dangerousness of this cannot be underestimated.”The post comes as the former FBI director is about to publish FDR Drive, the third installment of a crime series about a fictional New York lawyer, Nora Carleton. Publisher’s Weekly outlined the plot as centering on a US attorney who tries to bring to justice “a far-right media personality with a popular podcast vilifying those he thinks are destroying America: intellectuals, immigrants, and people of color”. More

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      James Comey investigated over seashell photo claimed to be ‘threat’ against Trump

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      A photo of seashells posted on Instagram by the former FBI director James Comey is now being investigated by the US Secret Service, after the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said it constituted a “threat” against Donald Trump.On Thursday, Comey posted a photo of seashells forming the message “8647”, with a caption that read: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”Trump’s supporters have interpreted the message as an endorsement of violence against Trump – the 47th president. There is more debate around the use of 86, a slang term often used in restaurants to mean getting rid of or throwing something out, and which, according to Merriam-Webster, has been used more recently, albeit sparingly, to mean “to kill”.Comey later took down his post, saying in a statement that he was unaware of the seashells’ potential meaning and saying that he does not condone violence of any kind.“I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message,” Comey said in a statement. “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.”A spokesperson for the Secret Service confirmed the agency was “aware of the incident” and said it would “vigorously investigate” any potential threat, but did not offer further details.The post ignited a firestorm on the right, with Trump loyalists accusing the former FBI director of calling for the president’s assassination. Trump survived an attempt on his life at a campaign event in Pennsylvania last year.“Disgraced former FBI director James Comey just called for the assassination of POTUS Trump,” Noem wrote on X. “DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.”Comey and Trump have a deeply antagonistic relationship that stretches back to the early days of the first Trump administration when, according to Comey, Trump sought to secure a pledge of loyalty from the then FBI director, who refused.In a move that shocked Washington, Trump dismissed Comey, who was leading the criminal investigation into Russian meddling in the US election. Comey later wrote a memoir that recounted the episode, prompting Trump to declare him an “untruthful slime ball”.Comey has remained a Maga world bête noire, drawing rightwing ire whenever he steps into the political fray.Allies of the president were swift to condemn Comey on Thursday. “We are aware of the recent social media post by former FBI director James Comey, directed at President Trump,” Kash Patel, the FBI director, wrote on X, adding: “We, the FBI, will provide all necessary support.”Taylor Budowich, the White House deputy chief of staff, also responded by calling the photo “deeply concerning” and accused Comey of putting out “what can clearly be interpreted as ‘a hit’ on the sitting President of the United States”.Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett, a staunch Trump supporter, called for Comey to be jailed. “Arrest Comey,” he wrote on X. More

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      James Comey: ‘I’d like to take readers inside the White House’

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      After a long career as a state attorney in New York, James Comey became director of the FBI in 2013. He was due to serve 10 years, but was dismissed by President Trump in 2017, having ordered an investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Comey has subsequently published two bestselling accounts of his time in office. His first novel, Central Park West, a crime thriller set in the New York district attorney’s office where Comey once worked, will be published this month.Have you always been a fan of crime fiction?I found it too hard when I was dealing with crime or terrorism in my day job to read about those things. The FBI job was really a 24-hour thing and I didn’t want to fill any spare moments reading fiction about my work.Do investigators and writers share an eye for detail?I think that good journalists and good lawyers think and communicate in stories. Even as a kid, I was always someone who would try to remember details so I could go home and tell my family the story at our dinner table.There must have been an element of nostalgia in locating this novel in the New York law courts where you once worked?I enjoyed travelling back in my mind to those places. I could picture myself in courtroom 318, where a lot of the action in the book takes place. But here’s the thing that made it both slightly strange and wonderful for me: when I was writing this, my oldest daughter was the chief of the violence and organised crime unit in Manhattan, and she was also literally standing in courtroom 318, prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator. That made it easy to make Nora, the protagonist in my book, a woman, and to picture her in those places.The book also draws on your experience of prosecuting New York crime families.My life changed when I watched the bail hearing for the mafia boss “Fat Tony” Salerno and his co-defendant Vincent “the fish” Cafaro [in 1989]. As I watched the young prosecutors in court, I was struck by how they stood up straight. They didn’t interrupt answers. When they didn’t know something, they said they didn’t know it. It was like being struck by proverbial lightning sitting there in that old federal courtroom. I always hated bullies. I’d been bullied as a kid. And I thought: here’s a way of [taking on] some of the biggest bullies in the world. I went home and called my girlfriend, now my wife, and said: I figured out what I want to do.You wrote in your memoir, A Higher Loyalty, of your immediate sense that President Trump shared characteristics with some of those mafia mob bosses you had prosecuted. In particular in the demand for loyalty above truth…Yes, I saw it so early that I resisted that sense to begin with. But something I was seeing was reminding me of scenes from my prosecutorial life. Those impressions can be misleading. But this one was dead on.The extraordinary thing was how quickly his extreme behaviour was normalised?I think it was. For the great bulk of people, there was an inability to get their mind around how bad this person is, because he was occupying an office that we endow with all kinds of dignity and importance. I remember cases I was involved with as a prosecutor, where fraud victims came to the fraudster’s sentencing to speak for him, because they simply could not acknowledge they had been defrauded. It was too painful. Supporters of Donald Trump, they see the images of January 6, which shout to them: “You fool! Look what you did!” Some people can face that. But most people turn from that pain and retreat deeper into the lie.Do you see yourself writing fiction about that period as well?I do. My wife is my ideas person. Her view is that it’s too close to write about now. I have in mind doing a trilogy [of novels] based in New York. And I’d like to write a trilogy based in Virginia, where I was a prosecutor for many years. And then I’d like to take readers inside the White House and the FBI and the justice department of the CIA. I’ve spent a lot of time in those places.You have insisted many times that you will never run for political office. Are there other ambitions still in public life, or is that chapter over?I would never, as you said, run for office. It’s just not something that suits me. And I think I’ve disqualified myself from other [legal] roles, because I intentionally became a political partisan after I got fired, because I thought the existential danger to democracy was so great from Donald Trump. So I’m going to try to write novels until I’m old and foolish, and also try to be, as some of my coffee mugs already claim, the world’s greatest grandfather.It sounds like your wife is the big reader of fiction in your household. But are there novels that have been guiding lights for you in taking on this new career?The first sustained reading of fiction I did, in thinking about this, was Le Carré. Partly because I knew he had struggled with the question: how do I write about my work? The criticism of his early books was that he hewed too closely to the truth of his job: desks and files and so on. At some point, his letters reveal, he realised he needed to get the Berlin Wall and some barbed wire in there. I’m no Le Carré, but I’ve tried to do something similar in Central Park West. I don’t think my friends [from the FBI] are going to find significant unrealistic details. But I’ve tried to see if I can keep it real and entertaining at the same time… More

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      ‘The Capitol riot was our Chernobyl’: James Comey on Trump, the ‘pee tape’ and Clinton’s emails

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      As an investigator turned author, James Comey has developed a forensic eye for detail. The colour of the curtains in the Oval Office. The length of Donald Trump’s tie. Something about the US president that the camera often misses.
      “Donald Trump conveys a menace, a meanness in private that is not evident in most public views of him,” says Comey, a former director of the FBI, from his home in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC.
      That menace came flooding out to engulf the US on 6 January when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in Washington. Five people, including a police officer, were killed in the mayhem. Comey, whose unorthodox interventions in the 2016 election are blamed by many liberals for putting Trump in the White House, watched in horror.
      “I was sickened to watch an attack on the literal and symbolic heart of our democracy, and, as a law enforcement person, I was angered. I am mystified and angry that Capitol Hill wasn’t defended. It’s a hill! If you wanted to defend it, you could defend it, and for some reason it was not defended. I think that’s a 9/11-size failure and we’re going to need a 9/11-type commission to understand it so that we don’t repeat it.”
      If he were still at work in the FBI’s brutalist building on Pennsylvania Avenue, Comey would be at the heart of the hunt for the domestic terrorists. He misses the job. Aged 60, a father of five and grandfather of one, he has spent the pandemic learning yoga, training to become a foster parent again and preparing for a teaching job at Columbia University in New York.
      Comey has also written another memoir, Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency and Trust, a slender sequel to his 2018 bestseller, A Higher Loyalty. It includes anecdotes from his law enforcement career, tangling with the New York mafia and others, and quotations from William Shakespeare and Trump (who reported to Comey that “Putin told me: ‘We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world’”). It acknowledges the flawed history of his beloved FBI while defending the nobility of its purpose; he calls for it to strip the name of the former director J Edgar Hoover from its headquarters and rename it in honour of the civil rights hero John Lewis. More

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      Saving Justice review: how Trump's Eye of Sauron burned everything – including James Comey

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      With the storming of the Capitol, the fired FBI director’s earnest attempt to help America recover has been overtaken by eventsComey: Trump should not be prosecuted after leaving officeA centuries-old norm has been broken. The inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will not mark the peaceful transition of power. On Wednesday, American carnage arrived. Five people including a police officer are dead. Related: After Trump review: a provocative case for reform by Biden and beyond Continue reading… More

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      'A horror film': The Comey Rule is a devastating portrayal of Trump

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      James Comey shuffles backwards and tries in vain to blend into a curtain. Donald Trump summons him across the room as photographers click furiously. The US president uses their handshake to aggressively yank Comey closer. “I look forward to working with you,” he mutters menacingly into the FBI director’s ear. “Let’s take a picture.”This awkward real life incident from three years ago is now the stuff of a blockbuster TV drama. The Comey Rule, starring Jeff Daniels and Brendan Gleeson, offers a devastating portrayal of a president just five weeks before he seeks re-election. At nearly four hours, with a cast of Oscar and Emmy winners, it might be regarded as the longest and most star-studded attack ad in history.“The Comey Rule is a horror film,” wrote Laura Miller on the Slate website, “and the monster is Donald Trump”.The glossy miniseries looks set to be as divisive as Comey himself. TV critics have complained about its casting and audacious attempt to present contemporary events as history. Democrats are likely to quibble over its sympathetic portrayal of Comey, while Republicans may dismiss it as anti-Trump propaganda from the Hollywood elite.Billy Ray, who wrote and directed the drama, said he is braced for the storm. “Donald Trump is not a person who in the past has taken criticism with a great deal of grace. I do think we’re going to be part of a broad national conversation about what happened in 2016 and the repercussions as they affect 2020.”I think we’re going to be part of a broad national conversation about what happened in 2016 and the repercussions as they affect 2020Billy RayThe drama is based on Comey’s 2018 memoir A Higher Loyalty and explores the former FBI director’s widely criticized oversight of dueling election year investigations: one into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of emails, the other into contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia. It then follows Comey’s excruciating interactions with President Trump, culminating in his firing – via cable news – in May 2017.“What makes James Comey interesting as a character is that he is flawed,” Ray, 56, said by phone from Los Angeles. “I would never want to tell a story about somebody who was unflawed and he knows that I feel that way, and he knew that I felt that way from the jump.“What I think about James Comey is he has never once said a word in public that has been proven to be untrue. It’s not like anything he has said has been close to untrue or shaky. You certainly cannot say that about Donald Trump or Michael Flynn or Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Mike Pence or anybody else in that administration. When it comes to truthfulness, I’ll stick with Comey.”“But more importantly, I felt his story was very emotional and very compelling and just dramatic by its nature, and that if you captured it right, you’d wind up with a piece that was very harrowing and oddly hopeful by the end.” More

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      Donald Trump v the United States review: how democracy came under assault

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      Now disgraced, Jerry Falwell Jr once announced that Donald Trump was entitled to an extra two years on the job as “reparations” for a “failed coup”, meaning the Mueller investigation. Joe Biden has gone so far as to predict the president will try to steal the election.Trump and his backers openly speak of four terms in office. “If you really want to drive them crazy, say 12 more years,” the president cackles, despite express constitutional strictures to the contrary.Even as doubts surrounding its legitimacy grow, the election assumes ever greater significance. Michael Schmidt’s first book is aptly subtitled: “Inside the Struggle to Stop a President.”The Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter chronicles what he has seen from his “front-row seat”. It was Schmidt who broke news of Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email while secretary of state, and of James Comey authoring a memo that detailed the president ordering him to end the FBI investigation of Gen Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.Hindering Trump is one thing, stopping him something elseSchmidt argues persuasively that the Trump presidency has highlighted the fragility of American democracy, and that Trump views the rule of law as something for others. More precisely, the president believes prison is meant for his political adversaries but not so much for his convicted cronies and for himself, never. Schmidt documents how Trump sought to prosecute Clinton and Comey: literally and seriously.A central premise of Donald Trump v the United States is that those who have sought to thwart the president have failed. Comey is no longer FBI director, Gen John Kelly is no longer White House chief of staff. Donald McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, is back in private practice.Trump usually gets what he wants. Jared Kushner, for example, holds a “top secret” security clearance despite persistent objections from senior White House staff and the intelligence community. After all others refused, Trump personally granted his son-in-law his clearance. Hindering Trump is one thing, stopping him something else. Over on Capitol Hill, according to Schmidt, Trump has “routinely outflanked the Democratic lawmakers investigating him”, while Republican leaders have emerged as “Trump’s public defenders”. Career civil servants, including those at the Food and Drug Administration, are “maligned” as part of a ‘Deep State’.” So what if a pandemic rages?Similarly, Trump targets journalists as “fake news” and as “enemies of the people”, a term popularized by Joseph Stalin. As one administration insider has said, it’s all a “bit” reminiscent of the “late” Weimar Republic.Schmidt frames his book as a four-act play, Comey and McGahn the central actors, a quote from King Lear as prelude. Chapters weave context with drama, even as they inform.The reader is continuously reminded of how many days remained before a particular event, such as “Donald Trump is sworn in as president”, “the appointment of special counsel Robert S Mueller III” or the “release of the Mueller Report”. It difficult to forget what came next. Donald Trump v the United States is laden with direct quotes and attribution. It is credible and intriguing. Beyond that, it is also unsettling.Schmidt details McGahn’s cooperation with the special counsel. Here, he recalls a conversation for the ages, with McGahn while he was still White House counsel and Mueller’s investigation was months away from its end.“You did a lot of damage to the president,” Schmidt tells McGahn, minutes before a thunderstorm over the White House. “I understand that. You understand that. But [Trump] doesn’t understand that.”McGahn replies: “I damaged the office of the president. I damaged the office.”Schmidt parries: “That’s not it. You damaged him, and he doesn’t understand that.”Ultimately, McGahn responds: “This is the last time we ever talk.”On cue, the rain begins to fall.Equally vivid are exchanges between Comey and his wife, Patrice, she of a keener sense of peril. As he moved toward announcing the FBI’s determination surrounding Clinton’s emails, in late June 2016, she presciently warned: “This is going to be bad for you.”According to Schmidt, Patrice Comey also pleaded, “You’re going to get shot … you’re going to get slammed.” Months later, her husband would tell the Senate judiciary committee it made him “mildly nauseous to think we might have had some impact on the election”.The book also clears up the mystery of what happened to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation, which if concluded would likely have examined Trump’s broader ties with Moscow. One day it was there, the next day it had vanished.Specifically, the special counsel’s report addressed conspiracy and obstruction of justice but did not discuss related counterintelligence issues. Schmidt reveals that we can blame that on Rod Rosenstein, then deputy attorney general.According to Schmidt, in the hand-off of the FBI investigation to Mueller, in the aftermath of the firing of Comey, Rosenstein deliberately narrowed the special counsel’s remit. The deputy attorney general directed Mueller to concentrate on criminality. Whether Trump was a Russian agent was not on the special counsel’s plate.According to Schmidt, Rosenstein “had foreclosed any deeper inquiry before investigation even began”. This is the same Rosenstein who in spring 2017 suggested he secretly record the president, and that the cabinet consider removing him from office.“The president had bent Washington to his will,” Schmidt writes.The question now is whether the electorate follows. America goes to the polls in little more than nine weeks. More