We are about to have a mugshot of “America’s Tallest Teenage Girl,” as my boss, Ben Domenech, likes to joke.
Yes. All 6 feet and 8 inches of James Comey, the former FBI director who spent years weaponizing the Justice Department against President Donald Trump, is surrendering to federal authorities today after a grand jury in North Carolina handed down two felony counts, each carrying up to five years in prison.
To quote the wise Hillary Rodham Clinton: “No one is above the law.”
I can’t help but laugh at the sheer teenage drama of it all, because as a former teenage girl myself, I know this character arc by heart. Comey’s entire career has been one long, awkward coming-of-age story, and he’s finally reaching the make-or-break point of girlhood.
In the beginning, there is a quest for autonomy. That early-teen “you’re not the boss of me” phase my mother begrudgingly endured, where you suddenly become the smartest person in the house. As FBI director, Comey weaponized the Department of Justice against a duly elected president, signed off on FISA warrants built on a phony Steele dossier, pushed the Russia collusion hoax for years, and leaked sensitive memos to the media while dressing it up as “higher loyalty.” Classic teenager move: convinced that perceived righteousness exempts you from the rules everyone else has to follow.
He then enters the social performance stage of life, that unruly stretch of caring too much what your tribe thinks. Comey began this stage last year when he “stumbled upon” seashells on the seashore, arranged to spell “86 47.” For anyone who doesn’t speak dinner-table shorthand: “86” has meant “get rid of it” since the 1930s. “47” is, of course, the 47th president, Donald Trump. But you needn’t know either of those facts to get the message. At the time he posted it, Leftist protesters were plastering that phrase everywhere. It was the new viral call-to-death chant against the president.
Comey himself admitted he recognized it as a “clever political thing,” before gushing over the “artistic flair” of the seashells, snapping a photo, and posting it to Instagram for his hundreds of thousands of followers. He knew exactly what he was doing.
This is the same man who spent decades prosecuting gangs for far less direct threats, but he believes he’s above institutional power, so he thought a simple “delete and play dumb” would suffice. That’s how coded language works in the assassination culture the Left has mainstreamed — where 56% of left-wingers say it would be somewhat justifiable to murder the president — plausible deniability built right in. “They were just pretty seashells!”
This matters more than a beach photo op. At the time Comey posted it, Trump had already survived at least two assassination attempts. The shot had already been fired. The bullet had already grazed his ear. And Comey, the former head of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, decided that was the moment to signal to the mob.
Finally, Comey has entered his principled idealist phase. The late-teen “I’m immovable and morally superior” stage. After the indictment dropped, Comey released a video declaring, “I’m still innocent, and still not afraid.” He’s the protagonist in his own head, forever the hero resisting the big bad demagogue.
We can be certain of this because he quite literally wrote a book about it. His new novel explores how right-wing podcasters are radicalizing people into political violence.
You can’t help but laugh.
The man who posted a public call to “86” a sitting president — one who had already survived multiple assassination attempts — is now lecturing America about incitement.
Let’s also be honest about the obvious double standard: imagine, for one second, current FBI Director Kash Patel posting a photo of seashells spelling out “86 46” about Joe Biden. We all know what it would mean. We all know exactly how fast the media and the DOJ would have detonated. But when Comey did signal the useful idiots to remove the 47th president? Crickets.
This was never about seashells. It’s about an assassination culture the Left spent years building. The manifestos, the cheers when the bullet missed, the “mostly peaceful” rhetoric that somehow always ends with conservatives in the crosshairs. Comey didn’t just participate in that culture. He performed it on the national stage, with his name, his platform, and his hundreds of thousands of followers, and then acted shocked when his actions had consequences.
America’s Tallest Teenage Girl is finding out.
He’ll whine, he’ll cry, he’ll insist it was just a silly beach photoshoot. But we know better, and more importantly, so does a grand jury in North Carolina.
As the teens would say, Karma is a B*tch.