Last night, at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance leadership dinner, 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.
As far as finding Comeys Twitter goes, the only hint he offered was the fact that he has to be on Twitter now, meaning that the account would likely be relatively new. Regarding his Instagram identity, though, Comey gave us quite a bit more to work with:
... I care deeply about privacy, treasure it. I have an Instagram account with nine followers. Nobody is getting in. Theyre all immediate relatives and one daughters serious boyfriend. I let them in because theyre serious enough. I dont want anybody looking at my photos. I treasure my privacy and security on the internet. My job is public safety.
Both a noble sentiment and an extremely helpful clue for tracking down the FBI directors social media accounts. Because, presumably, if we can find the Instagram accounts belonging to James Comeys family, we can also find James Comey.
Unfortunately, Instagram isnt exactly conducive to custom searching, and there was no way any of his five children or his wife would be using their full names. Twitter, however, gives us a little more leverage.
After some trial and error, I found that his 22-year-old son, Brien Comey, seemed to have the largest online presence as a basketball star at Kenyon College. Go Lords.
It wasnt easy to find Brien Comey on Twitter, though, because his first name is also the middle name of his father, who more people than you might think call James Brien Comey on Twitter.
After a few frustrated attempts, I tried the following Twitter search on a whim:
"brien comey"-james
This would bring up any mentions of the younger Comey while leaving out any references to his father.
That led me to this tweet from the Twitter account of the Kenyon College basketball team, on which the younger Comey played as an undergraduate. It showed Comey teaching basketball to some schoolkids, and @-mentioned the now-dead Twitter account @twittafuzz. That account, if you search through its mentions, appears to have been previously owned by Brien Comeyif you believe the folks on Twitter congratulating @twittafuzz for his dads ascension to the head of the FBI.
Click through to the linked photo, and youll find that a well-wisher has left a comment in which none other than Brien Comey is tagged. Now, our FBI Director has trained his son well. His Instagram account is locked down. Instagram itself, however, offers a little loophole that is terrible for user privacy but wonderfully helpful for our purposes today.
The suggestions were algorithmically selected based on the account I requested to follow, a significant number of which bore the last name Comey (Patrice is his wife). Among the various Comeys, 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 wasnt sure that this was, in fact, James Comey. But a quick Google search turned up this article on Comeys 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. Though there is an @ReinholdNiebuhr, based on the tweets alone I was pretty sure that he was not our guy
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 accountsmeaning he is not a subscriber to the followback philosophy. If he is following a random eggand is the only account following itthere is probably a reason.
That reason could be the fact that, as Wittes wrote here, he is a personal friend of James Comey. (Weve reached out to Wittes for comment but have yet to hear back.)
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 Posts Ellen Nakashima and David Ignatius, all of whom have been aggressively covering the FBI investigation into Trumps 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).
