The Comey Case Will Collapse Before It Ever Reaches a Jury

Med ett abonnemang hos tvätta kan du få en skinande ren bil lite oftare till ett lägre pri. Allt du behöver göra är att ladda ner tvätta bilt och teckna ett abonnemang direkt i appen. Just nu får du 100 kronor i rabbatt de första tre månaderna. Vi finns för dig som behöver tvätta.

Hey everyone, Ellie here wishing you a happy Friday. Well, you probably saw on a sad note that Ted Turner passed away this week. Of course, Turner in his long and remarkable life is best known for creating CNN. No, I never got to meet Ted Turner. By the time I arrived in twenty eighteen, Turner was mostly keeping to Atlanta and to his family.

But I am very well aware of and grateful for all that he did. I have met several of the people who were there with him at the founding of CNN in nineteen eighty. They started a few years before and it's always Such an honor to meet those folks and to know that I'm doing a very small part to carry on the legacy of this incredible institution that they built.

If you look at Ted Turner's life, it's just one of those lives where all the cliches come true, where this man changed the world because of his vision and his perseverance and his just force of will. Um, so many things that he did. I first became aware of Ted Turner in the 1980s. I was a baseball maniac and I knew he was the owner of the Atlanta Braves. Um, and the cool thing about the Braves at the time was all you could really see in the 80s.

was your own home team. You couldn't see there was no MLB network. There was no ESPN sh there was ESPN, but they weren't showing baseball. Except you could see the Braves because they were on the Turner networks on cable. Uh the Braves weren't very good at the time. All apologies to the great Dale Murphy, but they just weren't very good. But you could see all the other teams, and I knew who Ted Turner was.

And that's my first awareness of him. Of course, he did so much more than that. He became a massive altruist. an environmentalist. He preserved thousands of acres of land. He basically single-handedly was responsible for saving and regenerating a certain species of, I don't know if it's buffalo or bison or what. Uh he donated millions upon millions of dollars.

to environmental causes and to preservation causes. He got into the competitive sailing world and competed in the America's Cup. Uh but of course His main contribution, his main achievement was the creation of CNN. And if you look back in history, you know, I read a book a few years ago. I want to give you the exact title in case you're interested. It's called Up All Night, Ted Turner, CNN and the Birth of 24-Hour News. It's by Lisa Napoli, 2020 book. I read it maybe two, three years ago.

Unbelievable what Ted Turner had to do to get CNN made. It was seen as a ridiculous notion. He was laughed at, he was scoffed at. by network television executives, by banks where he needed financing, by technological people who told him it was impossible. Uh people made fun of it. They called it what the chicken noodle news network. We've been called worse since then.

Um, but it was seen as a ridiculous idea to have twenty-four hour access to news. At the time it was you had news at six thirty on NBC and CBS and ABC. You had your local news at eleven, and that was it. Um, but it turned out Ted Turner. Change the world. And you can argue that the advent of 24-hour news and all the things that it has spawned has had its negative effects. I'll hear you on that.

But I think by and large, giving the American public access to more information, more understanding of what's happening around the world, what its governmental leaders are doing, I think that's a good thing. So if you're ever at our headquarters, CNN's headquarters in New York, we have this one hallway that's basically a museum and it has all these photos.

and artifacts from these moments in history that we've covered. There's a chunk of the Berlin Wall and an image of our coverage of that. There's an image of the Challenger explosion. There's old cameras. There's all this stuff. And of course there's a big photo of Ted Turner. And this quote is written on the wall from the

founding of CNN on June 1st, 1980. I'm just going to read you a little bit of it. Indulge me for just a second. Ted Turner said this to the crowd, quote, to act upon one's convictions while others wait. To create a positive force in a world where cynics abound, to provide information to people where it wasn't available before, to offer those who want it a choice. For the American people whose thirst for understanding and a better life has made this venture possible. End quote.

Um, I love that. I think it's inspiring. You know, I walk by it every day, uh, but sort of stopped and reread it yesterday. Um, and again, whether you think CNN or cable news or 24 hour news is good or bad. And there's some of both. Um, I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's unquestionably a good thing that the American people have more access to information and as Ted Turner said, the ability to make a choice.

If you want that information, you can get it. If you want to act on that information, you can. And again, it's uh it's humbling to be even a very, very small part of that now. I was also reminded of something I totally forgot. So one of Ted Turner's many, many accomplishments is he created TCM, Turner Classic Movies, with the goal of preserving and making sure that

uh old black and white movies would be available for future generations. So TCM did this thing where they asked me to look at old black and white courtroom movies like Twelve Angry Men and To Kill a Mockingbird. and a handful of others. And um you can find this. It's on YouTube. If you just search Ellie Honig, TCM, movies, whatever, it'll come up. And it was so much fun.

to do that to critique these movies and to sort of talk about what was realistic and what wasn't. There's a great one where Katherine Hepburn is playing a a courtroom lawyer. Boy, um, you know, it's one of those names I've heard, but I've never really seen her. But she is just Such a force on the screen. We should ooh. Okay. This is occurring to me real time. Cafe should do this.

Free Tamara, let's do it. Let's do modern movies like that. Let's team me up with Mimi or Joyce or Barb or whoever and let us do like 20-minute bits. on what are the good parts of this movie, what reminds us of things from our career, is it realistic or not? Okay, folks, so you know I always end these by saying send us your thoughts, questions, comments to letters atcafe.com. Do that, but let's start a grassroots lobbying campaign.

Write your emails to Tamara. Okay. She's the one. She's the big power player. Sorry, T. Tell her, I want to see this movie thing. Have Ellie do it with whoever, whoever we can rotate. Let's get this done. Um, okay, folks, once again that address uh is letters at cafe dot com. Thanks for listening and uh thanks for letting me just express my thoughts on Ted Turner. May he rest in peace and may his memory be a blessing.

When Jim 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. Jim Comey is a legendary blowhart.

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. And if you check out the written piece, You can see a link to this where he's laughing and high-fiving about how he essentially tricked the incoming White House. Call me leak. To paint himself as a hero and undermine both Clinton in twenty sixteen and Trump.

in twenty seventeen and then claim 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. And again, folks, if you want to see this There's a hyperlink to an interview with Anderson Cooper where Comey is talking nonsense, admitting that he leaked, but claiming he didn't leak. And Anderson is unconvinced by Comey's explanation. Nobody likes Jim Comey and everyone's 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 eighty six 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, isn't it?

After he circulated the image, the Secret Service requested an interview, which Comey granted. Comey then took down the image and posted, quote, I didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down, end quote. Nearly a year later, the Justice Department indicted Comey for willfully and knowingly making a threat to take the life of and to inflict bodily harm upon the president.

and for transmitting that threat through interstate commerce, meaning the internet.

But not every indictment makes it to trial. And Comey has three compelling arguments for pretrial dismissal, all of them likely winners, any one sufficient to end the case. First and most fundamentally, 8647 is nowhere near clear enough to constitute a criminal threat. 47 plainly refers to Trump, the 47th president, but 86 is open to wide and wildly varying interpretations. Yes, 86 has occasionally been used in pop culture to refer to murder or death.

But the far more common usage is innocuous, derived from the restaurant industry, to mean that a menu item has run out or that a customer should be cut off. The major English dictionaries concur that 86 refers to getting rid of or running out of something, not murder or death. Trump and other armchair mob experts have scrambled to claim that, quote, 86 is actually a mob term for kill him. That's something Trump said.

As a former federal prosecutor and co chief of the Southern District of New York's organized crime unit, allow me to testify. No it's not. I spent years talking directly with gangsters and listening to them talk to one another over wiretaps or bugs. Yet I never once heard any real mobster use 86 to refer to a murder or anything else for that matter. And just to make sure, I texted two other decades-long FBI agents who investigated the mob and they said the same thing.

The fallback position seems to be that mobsters use the term 86 to refer to murder in the movies. What movies, though? Nobody uses that phrase in any of the three Godfathers or Goodfellas or Donnie Brasco or The Departed or any of the Sopranos episodes. There is one arguable opaque reference in the 1995 movie Casino, but the fact that defenders of this indictment, the few that there are, have to dig back 30 plus years for a single pans scraping of support?

That demonstrates the case's fundamental weakness. And even if there were more examples, it's not nearly enough for prosecutors to show that one of several potential interpretations of AD6. could refer to murder. The term is ambiguous at best, and ambiguity doesn't get a prosecutor anywhere near proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Trump himself doesn't even seem to firmly believe that Comey's post is an actual threat.

When asked last week by CNN's Caitlin Collins whether he really thought his life was in danger, Trump responded, quote, probably, I don't know, before he eventually stumbled his way to yeah. Either of those first two phrases out of Trump's mouth probably, and I don't know, would tank the prosecution's case. If the jury doesn't know whether Comey's statement was a criminal threat, or even if it concludes that it probably was. That's reasonable doubt. That's an acquittal.

All told the District Court judge Louise Flanagan, a two thousand three appointee of George W. Bush. can and should dismiss the Comey indictment based on the First Amendment. Consider for comparison this statement by Vietnam war protester Robert Watts in 1968. He said, quote, I am not going, meaning to Vietnam. If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ. End quote.

The Supreme Court found that even that fairly explicit statement was not enough to support a threat's prosecution. First Amendment protected political speech, the court ruled, is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact. And Watts' statement was, quote, political hyperbole, not a true threat, and not criminal. Come's post, ill advised as it was, was far less specific and less threatening than Watts' statement, and falls comfortably within the First Amendment's protection.

Comey also separately has a valid motion to dismiss based on vindictive prosecution. If a defendant can show that his prosecution is payback from the government for his prior exercise of a legal or constitutional right, Then a judge can throw out the charge before trial. Consider the history. Trump and Comey are longtime public antagonists.

Over the years, they've made hundreds of public statements bashing one another. Lest there be any doubt about his intentions, in September 2025, Trump posted on social media that quote Pam, meaning then A G Pam Bondy, remember her? must indict Comey and others, and that all caps justice must be served now.

Bondi eventually did just that, the first Comey indictment relating to alleged leaking and perjury, and promptly lost that case in November 2025 when a judge ruled that the U.S. attorney had been improperly appointed. The new indictment, Comey will argue, is a continuation of the long running personal beef between him and the president and governmental retribution after Comey beat the Justice Department's first case.

Finally, Comey can argue selective prosecution, meaning he has been singled out for criminal charges, among others who've engaged in similar conduct. Indeed, high-profile politicians and commentators have recently used that same phrase, 86, without being prosecuted, including right-wing influencer Jack Pasobiek, who tweeted, quote, 8646. In twenty twenty two, regarding then President Joe Biden, the forty-sixth president.

Last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that any comparison between Pesobiek's statement and Comey's Seashell post is, quote, just completely not true, and that the issues are, quote, different. When in fact the two statements are exactly the same eighty six forty seven and eighty six forty six.

Pesobiac and others who used eighty six were not prosecuted, and should not have been, while Comey, the explicit target of various presidential rants, now faces two federal felony charges. Prosecutions don't get more selective than that. If the DOJ's goal is merely to indict Comey again and to generate fodder for Blanche to offer as audition material to Trump and to cause Comey the indignity and expense of yet another criminal defense.

Well, then they've already succeeded. But if the goal is to bring a valid and worthwhile criminal case, Trump and his Justice Department will fail miserably yet again. Thanks for listening everyone. Stay safe and stay informed. Drömmer du om en strand villa på Maldiverna? Ett butikkhotell på Maritius. Eller en gömd ö i Grekland. Globrotter tar dig till exklusiva resmål och handplockade hotell, världen över. Boka digitalt.

På globrotter.se eller låt våra resexperter ta hand om varje liten detalj. Vi finns med hela vägen, före, under och efter resan. Globter en resarranjör utöver det vanligen.