In a bizarre and cringey five-and-a-half-minute video posted by James Comey to social media exclaiming his adoration of Taylor Swift, the former director of the FBI opens by claiming that Donald Trump is humiliating America through his negotiations with Vladimir Putin. In reality of course, the only one humiliating America, and himself, is James Comey.
That this man ever led the FBI – once considered the world’s premier law enforcement agency – speaks volumes about the discredit that that institution has brought upon itself.
Comey’s increasingly irrational behavior appears to necessitate some sort of intervention by those who love him. Recently we saw him assembling, and then photographing and posting to social media, shells on a beach to spell an implied assassination threat against the sitting president of the United States with the characters “8647”.
In his video paean to Swift, Comey says he feels like the Trump presidency is a bad dream he can’t wake up from. Funny. That’s exactly how I feel about James Comey.
In his Swifty video Comey details his seeming, frankly creepy, obsession with Taylor Swift, a young woman born the year after Comey’s daughter, Maurene, was born. That any middle-aged (elderly?) man would take such an interest in a young female recording artist, opine on the meaning of her songs’ lyrics, and brag about knowing them by heart is disturbing. But that this man led the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was involved in some of the most consequential decision-making at the highest levels of the United States government, impacting the course of this country, should disturb us all.
Comey’s descent into bizarreness is a bit reminiscent of Ramsey Clark, the attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson. Unlike Comey, Clark was an indisputably brave man. He dropped out of high school in World War II at age 17 to join the Marine Corps and fight for his country. After his service, he would go on to college and law school in Texas. He would become active in liberal legal causes in Texas and eventually join the Kennedy and then Johnson administrations, rising through the ranks.
Following his stint as attorney general, though, Clark’s behavior became increasingly odd. He opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which was a perfectly fine and principled position. However, in 1972 he was invited by the North Vietnamese government – while that government was at war with the United States and U.S. servicemen were dying – to visit that country and the American POWs held there.
Following his pilgrimage, Clark claimed that he was given unfettered access to North Vietnam and that American prisoners of war “could not be better.” He claimed that he was “touched” by the quality of medical and dental care they were receiving. One wonders what John McCain, severely tortured while in North Vietnamese captivity, and his fellow suffering POWs would have thought of Clark’s comments.
As even left-wing Politico writes, Clark evidenced all the traits of a “morally superior progressive” when he returned to the States and ran unsuccessfully for open U.S. Senate seats in New York in the 1970s.
Clark would become increasingly bizarre. After President Jimmy Carter inadvisedly called on Clark to help negotiate the release of the U.S. hostages being held in Iran, Clark advised the Iranian government to sue the United States and extolled the virtues of Persian poets.
Clark would then go on to either provide legal representation to or publicly embrace some of the world’s worst miscreants: Saddam Hussein, homicidal Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi, Manuel Noriega, the terrorist hijackers of the Achille Lauro, mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the bloodthirsty regimes of North Korea and Sudan, and even Lyndon Larouche.
Now, to my knowledge (although I’m open to correction), Ramsey Clark did not memorize the lyrics of Joni Mitchell songs, or wax on publicly about how he spent a fortune attending her concerts and was carried away by her exquisite songwriting.
Nor, to my knowledge, did Ramsey Clark spell out an implied assassination threat of, say, Richard Nixon, by constructing “8637” in seashells, photographing it and then spreading the photographs far and wide.
Say what you want about Ramsey Clark, the man’s actions, as reprehensible as they were following his stint as head of the Justice Department, were founded on sincerely held political convictions. While his moral compass seems to have been 180 degrees out of phase in terms of which public figures he chose to embrace and defend, he was a typical liberal. Much as we see today’s “progressives” condemning the police, embracing illegal aliens, and rioting over the drug overdose/heart failure death of a thuggish felon named George Floyd, Clark could be counted upon to choose precisely the wrong side in any moral equation.
James Comey is not that. He is simply strange. Making embarrassing obsessive videos over a young female pop star and spelling out death threats against a president with the remains of crustaceans is not based on wrongheaded political convictions. It speaks of mental health issues and it’s time for the Comey family to have an intervention.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for 39 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. His work has been featured on CBS News 48 Hours and NBC News Dateline. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)
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