James Comey
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James Comey is a former director of the FBI indicted during the second Trump administration. Kiriakou's analysis of the prosecution is procedural rather than partisan, and rests on a premise he applies to federal criminal law generally: that the average person in the United States, going about ordinary business on an ordinary day, commits three felonies. Given that, an administration that hates a man and wants to ruin him does not need to find that he committed a crime; it goes looking for some felonies to charge him with.

The venue and the prosecutor

The charges were sought in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Kiriakou himself was prosecuted. The US attorney there said he was not seeing any crimes, so he was fired and a new US attorney was named who said he would find some, and the judge, in Kiriakou's account, has refused to let it work that way.

Comey against Brennan

Kiriakou expects the government to jump up and down, scream and holler, and then move on rather than take a second run at the case. He rates the parallel case against John Brennan as the stronger one, and is careful to separate the two men: with Comey it is much less clear that any crime occurred, whereas "I know John Brennan to be a criminal." He also notes the political asymmetry, Comey is far more popular than Brennan.

Kiriakou on Comey before the indictment

The 2025 analysis sits at the end of a decade of commentary in which Kiriakou is more often Comey's critic than his defender, and occasionally the opposite.

In May 2017 he treated the Flynn request as a clear case against the president rather than against the director. That Trump asked the vice president and the attorney general to leave the room before raising the investigation was, he said, damning: it showed the president knew exactly what he was doing and knew he was about to say something improper. He called obstruction of justice pretty clear and impeachment a real possibility worth discussing, urged Congress to subpoena the tapes Trump had intimated existed, expecting them to confirm Comey's version, and predicted that Comey's open testimony would be explosive because he was expected to reveal that other crimes had been discussed. His explanation of the firing was equally blunt: Comey had got under Trump's skin by investigating his confidants and had refused to swear loyalty or drop the investigation, so he had to go.

Earlier still, Comey appears in the corpus as the government's voice against encryption, the FBI director arguing that encrypted communications should not be beyond the reach of the state, against which Kiriakou sets the warrant requirement and due process: without a warrant the government has no business knowing what is in his emails, his texts or his calls.

The Assange channel

The episode Kiriakou returns to most is one in which Comey acted decisively. A lawyer acting pro bono had opened a channel between the Justice Department and Julian Assange, under which Assange would agree to redactions and testify that Russia was not the source of the 2016 releases; the approach reached Senator Mark Warner, then co-chairman of the intelligence committee. Comey, in Kiriakou's account, told the Justice Department to shut it down, they were not going to give Assange any measure of comfort, and within about a week Assange proceeded with the release instead.

The double standard he objects to

Kiriakou's consistent complaint is not that Comey was pursued but that he was not. Comey was run out of the door for lying and never prosecuted, as was another senior official fired for lying, while the FBI lawyer who falsified a FISA document was prosecuted, a hierarchy of consequence he treats as a matter of rank rather than conduct. He is candid that his view of the man is coloured by what he reads as partisanship: looking at Comey's history and his fealty to Hillary Clinton, Kiriakou concludes he was working with the Clinton campaign.

He has also been in the room with him. Recalling a Washington breakfast at which Comey was present in 2015, Kiriakou's regret is that he did not then know what he later came to believe: had he known, "I would have had a lot more fun at that."

The specific deception he attaches to Comey's tenure is the FISA court: "We know they lied multiple times to the FISA court to get warrants against Carter Page." He raised it in December 2019 while describing what John Durham was assembling, and paired it with the claim that John Brennan had been telling Comey internally something other than what he was saying publicly.

See also

- Carter Page
- John Durham
- John Brennan
- Eastern District of Virginia
- FBI
- Overcriminalization
- Espionage Act
- Julian Assange
- FISA court
