When James Comey appears in federal court in North Carolina on Monday, it’ll mostly be about housekeeping. The parties will set schedules for discovery and motions and maybe a trial date in late 2026 or early 2027. But don’t bother marking your calendar. This preposterous prosecution will collapse before it ever reaches a jury.

Let’s stipulate up front: Comey is a legendary blowhard, an inveterate fibber, and a pretentious prig whose guiding principle is that he alone has access to some mystical code of morality that conveniently justifies his outrageous conduct over the past decade. The former FBI director’s arrogant defiance of core DOJ policy likely swung the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump and earned excoriation from the DOJ’s nonpartisan inspector general and a bipartisan procession of former AGs. Comey then launched a sneak attack on the incoming Trump administration and later chortled publicly about how he broke ordinary FBI protocol in the process. Comey leaked to paint himself as a hero to undermine Clinton (in 2016) and to undermine Trump (in 2017). Afterward he claimed that even though he arranged for sensitive FBI information to be released through a personal friend to the media, it somehow wasn’t a leak. Nobody likes the guy, and everyone has got their reasons.

But this indictment has nothing to do with any of that. It’s about seashells, arranged on a North Carolina beach to depict the numbers “86 47.” Comey snapped a photo of this fortuitous natural occurrence in May 2025 and posted it on Instagram with the caption, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” (Funny how this guy constantly stumbles on poignant anti-Trump symbolism while wandering through nature.) After Comey circulated the image, the Secret Service requested an interview, which he granted. Comey then took down the image and posted, “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any........

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