FBI Director Kash Patel hit at former Director James B. Comey for making comments about how the bureau is now run.
“You know, the FBI is bigger than any leader it’s ever had or ever will have,” Mr. Patel said Wednesday in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier.
Mr. Patel was asked about the recent Instagram post by Mr. Comey that depicted seashells that read “86 47.” Many took the picture to be calling for attacks on President Trump, since “86” is sometimes used as slang for “get rid of” something or someone and Mr. Trump is the 47th president.
Mr. Comey maintains that his post was never meant to be associated with a call for violence and deleted the post. The FBI and the Secret Service were investigating it as such.
“James Comey is a private citizen, and he can walk around the beach and talk about seashells and Crayola crayons for all I care about and talk about how we’re the conspiracy theorists,” Mr. Patel said. “But I’ll just remind the American people of one thing — when that man was the leader of the FBI, he perpetrated the largest criminal conspiracy, packaged political information from overseas, took it to a federal FISA court and illegally surveilled a political opponent.”
“I won’t be lectured on how to run this FBI from that man,” Mr. Patel said.
Mr. Comey, who was fired from the FBI in 2017 by Mr. Trump, raised questions Wednesday on CNN about how Mr. Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino are running the bureau.
He said he feels “kind of sorry” for Mr. Patel because “it’s like showing up for a final exam with no pencils and no paper and you didn’t even know there was a final exam.”
“So I hope the career people are able to support the director and the deputy director,” Mr. Comey said. “There are lots of people in the FBI who know what they’re doing. I hope these two guys are letting them guide them.”
Mr. Comey said that “nothing in their life or their career gives me confidence that they know anything about leading an organization like that.”
“So, I would have serious doubts. I bet they do internally about whether they have doubts,” he said.
Mr. Comey went on to say he was interviewed by the Secret Service over his social media post and just thought it was a “clever way” to show a political opposition message to Mr. Trump.
“I had never heard, actually still haven’t credibly heard, the numbers 86 associated with murder,” he said. “But if people were going to say that, which never occurred to me, I don’t want that on my Instagram post. And so I took it down.”
Mr. Patel said in his interview that the FBI has investigated a lot of “copycats” in the wake of the social media post.
“Do you know how many copycats we’ve had to investigate as a result of that beachside venture from the former director?” he said. “Do you know how many agents I’ve had to take offline from chasing down child sex predators, fentanyl traffickers, terrorists because everywhere across this country people are popping up on social media and think that a threat to the life of the president of the United States is a joke and they can do it because he did it?”
