This Is Almost Certainly James Comey’s Twitter Account

31st March 2017

Link reblogged from PAX AMERICANA with 1,488 notes

This Is Almost Certainly James Comey’s Twitter Account →

afloweroutofstone:
Last night, at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance leadership dinner, [FBI director James] Comey let slip that he has both a secret Twitter and an Instagram account in the course of relating a quick anecdote about one of his daughters…
Who am I to say no to a challenge?…
Among the various Comeys [suggested to someone who adds James Comey’s son on Instagram], only two of the suggested accounts lacked both real names and profile photos. And only one of these had anywhere near the “nine followers” that James Comey claimed to have. That account was reinholdniebuhr…
I still wasn’t sure that this was, in fact, James Comey. But a quick Google search turned up this article on Comey’s time at the College of William and Mary, and my doubts were assuaged:
By senior year, Comey was a double major in religion and chemistry, writing a senior thesis on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and televangelist Jerry Falwell and on his way to the University of Chicago Law School
With Instagram solved, it was time to move back to Twitter…
But fortunately for us, there are only seven accounts on Twitter currently using some variation of “Reinhold Niebuhr” as a user name.
And only one that seemed to be operating in stealth: @projectexile7.
But how to be sure? There is only one person currently following the account: Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare. Wittes is no Twitter neophyte. He is an active user with more than 25,000 followers, and he only follows 1,178 accounts—meaning he is not a subscriber to the “followback” philosophy. If he is following a random egg—and is the only account following it—there is probably a reason.
That reason could be the fact that, as Wittes wrote here, he is a personal friend of James Comey…
Project Exile happens to be a federal program that James Comey helped develop when he was a U.S. attorney living in Richmond. And then, of course, there are the follows.
ProjectExile7 follows 27 other accounts, the majority of which are either reporters, news outlets, or official government and law enforcement accounts. The New York Times’ Adam Goldman and David Sanger and the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and David Ignatius, all of whom have been aggressively covering the FBI investigation into Trump’s contacts with Russian agents, made the list, as did Wittes and former Bush Administration colleague Jack Goldsmith. Donald Trump is on there, too, but @projectexile7 seems to have begun following him relatively recently (its first follow was @nytimes).
There are two outliers: William & Mary News (where Comey attended undergrad) and our colleagues at The Onion (everyone deserves to have fun)…
And of the 39 total tweets the account has liked thus far, eight refer directly to the FBI or James Comey himself… One deals with an active FBI investigation… And four refer to the Trump administration in general.
Of course, none of this is definitive proof @projectexile7 is FBI Director James Comey, but it would take a nearly impossible confluence of coincidences for it to be anyone else. Take what you will from the fact that the director of the FBI appears to have liked a tweet from the New York Times about Mike Flynn and Jared Kushner meeting a Russian envoy in December.
We’ve reached out to the FBI for comment, and will update if and when we hear back…
Update 5:14 p.m.:
The FBI has officially weighed in:
Hello,
We don’t have any comment.
Thank you.
FBI National Press Office
lmao

Tagged: 2017

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This Is Almost Certainly James Comey’s Twitter Account →