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Comey Prosecution Looks A Lot Like Mueller in Reverse — and We’re All About It

Updated: CORRUPTION

The seashell case against James Comey might look like small potatoes compared to the earlier classified leaks prosecution that a Clinton-appointed judge dismissed on a technicality. But the Eastern District of North Carolina case is eminently winnable — and the discovery process is already surfacing evidence far more damning than the original Instagram post.

Here’s what we know from the court record so far. Comey received a text message from his wife Patrice just two minutes before posting the “86 47” seashell photo — a screenshot of a definition confirming that “86” means to eliminate or get rid of something. He posted the image anyway. Then a relative of the Comeys sent Patrice a blistering text condemning the post as “a call for violence,” saying: “I have held my tongue for a long time, but I just can’t do it anymore.” The family member added that they hoped Comey goes to jail for his crimes.

Patrice’s pre-post text — which the prosecution will likely use to establish premeditation — was only obtained because Comey refused to provide the original photo that contained its metadata. The FBI had to serve Apple with a warrant to retrieve it. That’s the detail that matters: Comey, the former FBI director who built his reputation on investigative integrity, withheld evidence from investigators working on his own case. His own agency had to go around him to get the file.

The irony compounds on itself. Comey pioneered the strategy of using minor process crimes and perjury traps against Trump allies as leverage to apply pressure in the broader Russia probe. Mueller used that same playbook to drag Manafort, Flynn, Stone, Papadopoulos, and Cohen through prosecutorial meat grinders — not for anything connected to Russian collusion, which was never proven, but for peripheral conduct that became criminal only because investigators were looking hard enough.

Now Comey is in the Eastern District of North Carolina with his own set of investigators looking hard at his phones, his metadata, his communications, and the conspiracy investigations that diGenova’s DOJ team has been running into the broader Russiagate operation — an operation that has Comey’s fingerprints all over the Oxferd Comma document, the Steele Dossier laundering, the “defensive briefings” to Republican senators that were designed to poison the Ukraine corruption investigation, and the shadow government that the CIA whistleblower confirmed was running in parallel to the White House.

Should Comey choose to strike a plea deal rather than face North Carolina’s federal correctional facility in Butner, he could become the most consequential witness in the entire conspiracy investigation. That’s the mirror image of how Mueller used Trump’s allies against him. The tools are the same. The targets have changed.

Poetic justice is too light a phrase for what this moment represents. The man who wrote the book on lawfare is now subject to the laws of that book. And it’s about damned time.