As news of former National Security Advisor Micheal Flynn’s guilty plea broke Friday morning, ousted FBI director James Comey appeared to mock the Trump administration on Twitter.
The tweet is the latest in a long-running war of words raging between Comey and Trump since the president dismissed Comey this past May. Comey’s firing, apparently at the advice of White House adviser and Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, is broadly understood to have led to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s decision to appoint Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It was Mueller’s investigation that yielded Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI about phone calls with Russian officials during the presidential transition.
Comey quoted the Old Testament’s Book of Amos and linked to a picture of the Potomac River’s Great Falls near Washington, DC:
Comey appears to have made a typo, leaving out the word “let” in what is otherwise the New Revised Standard Version of the bible, a translation popular among mainline Protestants in the United States. The verse is excerpted from a passage in which God rejects the sacrifices of the Israelites and condemns them for their sin and lack of righteousness despite their covenant with Him.
Comey’s exact meaning in the quotation is unexplained, but the language seems to suggest that his confidence Flynn’s guilty plea to a relatively minor offense will lead to greater charges against the administration that fired him. The reference to the Book of Amos itself may be an analogy to President Trump’s covenant with the American people which, in turn, does not excuse him from what Comey sees as his and his administration’s unrighteousness.
It is not the first time Comey’s online persona has taken on the tone of the pulpit. For months after his dismissal, Comey recounted his travelogue and took subtle jabs at Trump pseudonymously, using the name of eminent 20th Century moderate Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr, who in his early career was a Marxist fellow-traveler, became an oft-quoted religious authority of the post-war liberal internationalist consensus. President Barack Obama once referred to Niebuhr as his “favorite theologian.”