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Donald Trump may have personally undone the criminal case against one of his political nemeses, former FBI Director James Comey, thanks to his deep involvement.The Department of Justice accused Comey of threatening the president’s life when he posted a photo of seashells to his Instagram account last year, arguing that the message the shells spelled out—“86 47”—would be interpreted by any person “familiar with the circumstances” as a “serious expression of an intent to do harm to the president,” according to Comey’s indictment.But on Tuesday, Comey’s lawyers argued that the entire case should be moot due to Trump’s personal involvement in Comey’s questioning, according to a motion to dismiss first reported on by The New York Times. According to government documents handed over to Comey’s team, Trump told Secret Service agents who interviewed the former FBI director to send their notes to Air Force One for Trump’s personal review.The Secret Service questioned Comey by phone hours after he shared the protest message on Instagram on May 15. Despite being informed by a Secret Service agent that the telephone interview would likely suffice, Comey agreed to further questioning in Washington. “From that point forward, high-level DOJ and White House officials (including the President) involved themselves in the investigation,” stated Comey’s attorneys.The Secret Service chose to monitor Comey the next day on his drive to Washington despite lacking a warrant—a decision that was noted by at least one agent as, legally, a “bad idea” since there was no “imminent danger to life” that could justify the warrantless surveillance.They did so at the behest of the “number three” person at the DOJ, according to the legal document. That individual is not named in the memo, but the number three person at the DOJ is the associate attorney general, a position that was not filled by a Senate-confirmed official at the time of Comey’s surveillance. The agents tailed Comey and his wife even as they visited the grave of their deceased son, according to the filing.A government document obtained by Comey’s team revealed that “POTUS was requesting a copy of the interview notes to use in his 6 p.m. press conference.” One Secret Service agent described the interview as “a hot topic on the plane,” noting that Trump was “very interested,” according to the Times.Trump has been very public about his contempt for Comey since the FBI director led the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia following the 2016 presidential election. Trump fired Comey in the midst of that probe, prompting a follow-up investigation by Comey’s predecessor, special counsel Robert Mueller, that determined that Russian influence in the 2016 election was “sweeping and systemic” and found substantial (if non-prosecutable) evidence that Trump had obstructed justice by firing Comey.In another section of the legal filing, Comey’s attorneys revealed that the Trump administration attempted to prove the lethality behind Comey’s “86” post by questioning Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, a notorious gangster who was at one point the underboss in the Gambino crime family and was personally responsible for at least 19 murders. Gravano apparently confirmed the term’s violent definition, though he noted that a “gangster would never use that term” because it was too obvious to law enforcement.In the hours following Comey’s post, the Secret Service instituted a new policy that redefined “86 47” as a formal threat to the president’s life. However, the agency rolled back the change by the day’s end and returned to “business as usual” as the policy shift resulted in an overwhelming number of potential leads that lacked “threatening language,” according to the filing.Comey has denied the accusations, claiming that he was only familiar with the term via restaurant slang, where it contextually means to remove an item off the menu.

The community is facing violent settler expansion and the looming threat of demolition, while the Israeli who shot the beloved activist remains free. The post A year after Awdah’s killing, Umm Al-Khair struggles for its own survival appeared first on +972 Magazine.

A local elder and Black Panther veteran was attacked and brutally beaten by six teenagers at the same 7-11 in Baltimore where Victorious Swift was murdered in 2017. Now, the community is rising up to say, "Enough is enough!"

A group of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse are going door-to-door on Capitol Hill to deliver the government’s files to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.The survivors gathered for a press conference at the National Mall Wednesday to launch the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile, which will carry bound copies of all 3.5 million files to communities across the country throughout the midterm elections.As part of their launch, the survivors delivered printed copies straight to lawmakers’ offices, according to Miles Taylor, a former Trump official turned activist now involved with the bookmobile.The survivors took copies of the files to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is set to vote on advancing acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation on Thursday.Speaking at the press conference, the survivors urged against confirming Blanche, who only recently met with survivors after months of dodging victims and their demands for the Department of Justice to keep investigating. That meeting did not go well.“A vote for Todd Blanche is a vote against justice,” Elizabeth Stein, an Epstein survivor and anti–human trafficking educator, said Wednesday.Blanche previously tried to downplay the Epstein files’ thousands of redaction errors that exposed the names of survivors while concealing the identities of alleged perpetrators.Blanche’s confirmation is already in jeopardy at the hands of his own party. Two Republican lawmakers are refusing to approve Blanche unless he puts in writing that Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is actually dead.

The federal government’s investigation into former FBI Director James Comey has taken some extremely bizarre steps. Comey was charged with allegedly threatening violence against President Donald Trump in April with an Instagram post of numbers spelling out “86 47” in seashells. On Tuesday, Comey filed a motion to dismiss the case, and in that court filing, his lawyers listed some drastic steps taken by the authorities. The Department of Justice spoke to former mafia boss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano in an attempt to prove that the “86” in Comey’s post was an allusion to murder. But Gravano’s interview didn’t help their case, as he pointed out that real organized crime figures would think using the term was too obvious. Gravano also suggested the FBI should contact former federal prosecutor and judge John Gleeson for his opinion on the term, only for Gleeson to say, “The claim that ‘86’ is mafia jargon for ‘kill’ is preposterous.” Gleeson, who prosecuted notable organized crime cases, said that in thousands of hours of debriefings and conversations with mobsters, he had never heard the term used that way. Federal agents also used emergency cell phone tracking, which doesn’t require a warrant, to monitor Comey’s location while he was driving from North Carolina to Virginia shortly after he made the post. That location tracking is only supposed to be used in extreme situations, such as an “imminent threat to life or limb.” No such emergency existed, and one Secret Service agent later said in a memo that “we did not believe that anyone’s life was in immediate danger and legally it was a bad idea to ping the phone.”Trump fired Comey in 2017 over the federal investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election, and has targeted the former FBI director in his second term as president. This case against Comey has fallen apart several times already, and has only recently been revived by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. It seems destined to fail yet again.

A federal judge Tuesday tossed FBI Director Kash Patel’s $10 million lawsuit against a blogger who called him a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch.”In his final order, Nevada Chief District Judge Andrew Gordon dismissed Patel’s lawsuit against Jim Stewartson, finding that he did not have “personal jurisdiction” over the internet commentator.Gordon’s order put an end to a legal saga that began long before Patel was ever made director of the FBI.In June 2023, Patel filed a complaint that Stewartson was smearing him online by calling him a “blatantly incompetent chud” and a “Kremlin asset” who plotted to “overthrow the government” on January 6, 2021.Initially, Stewartson didn’t respond to the lawsuit, which led to Patel winning a $250,000 default judgment in August 2025. Stewartson challenged the default judgment on the grounds that he had no meaningful ties to Nevada, where the case was filed, and declared that Patel was a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” and, again, a “chud.”Stewartson celebrated the final order, which referenced his comment in a footnote. “I’d like to commend the judge for including ‘googly-eyed Kremlin bitch’ in his ruling,” Stewartson wrote on X Tuesday.“PSA: Now that my case is settled, you are free to refer to @FBIDirectorKash as a ‘chud,’ a ‘googly-eyed Kremlin bitch,’ and a ‘traitor’ without fear of legal repercussions!” he wrote in another post.Following President Donald Trump’s lead, Patel has filed six defamation lawsuits against journalists in just seven years. Patel recently filed a $250 million lawsuit against The Atlantic for reporting on his excessive drinking at work.