How many other Trump enemies are being warrantlessly wiretapped?
The government's own agents put it in writing that tracking James Comey was illegal. They did it anyway.
On the night of May 15, 2025, James Comey did something millions of us do every day: he opened Instagram and posted a photo. As is well known by now, it showed seashells on a North Carolina beach, spelling out “86 47.” That photograph is the entire basis for a federal prosecution that’s intended to send him to prison for up to a decade.
What happened next, laid bare in court filings unveiled last week, is why I believe the Comey prosecution will be remembered as one of the most significant First Amendment cases in American history. An American president is trying to imprison a critic for posting a photograph. And to build the absurd case, the government surveilled that critic without a judge’s approval, in a manner its own agents admitted in writing was illegal. The filings answer some questions about what was done to Comey, but they open a far larger one that may not be answered for years: how many other people is this administration illegally watching and preparing to illegally punish?
Here’s what we now know about a case that was already outlandish before an indictment was even issued.
Within hours of that Instagram post, the Secret Service had Comey on the phone. The next morning, Trump went on Fox News and declared that the picture “meant assassination.” By that afternoon, a senior Justice Department official, identified in the filings only as “the number three guy at DOJ,” wanted the Secret Service to ping Comey’s cellphone and track his location in real time.
The Secret Service’s own supervisor put his objection in writing. Pinging the phone “could be done,” he warned, “but it would be a bad idea.” Warrantless emergency tracking requires an imminent threat to life, and “we did not believe that anyone’s life was in immediate danger.” It was, in his words, “legally questionable.” His boss agreed, according to the emails, “but said we might do it anyway.”
And they did. The next day, an agent filled out a form telling Verizon the government faced “an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury,” certified that this was “true and correct,” and got Comey’s location data. There was no emergency, and everyone involved seemingly knew it. Agents then tracked Comey electronically and tailed him as he and his wife drove home from North Carolina to Virginia, including as they stopped to visit the grave of their deceased son. All the while, Trump was allegedly following it from Air Force One. The agent in charge traveling with the president emailed that the case was “a hot topic on the plane,” that Trump was “very interested,” and wanted Comey’s interview notes in hand for his six o’clock press conference.
So, to be clear, we found out that the president of the United States was aboard his airplane, personally tracking the surveillance of a private citizen who had posted a photo of four digits. Obvious free speech. Breathtaking abuse of power to punish it.
Then the story gets worse. The Secret Service investigated and found nothing. By November 2025 it had formally closed the matter, concluding there was no risk to the president’s life from James Comey (because of course there wasn’t) and no basis whatsoever for any charges. That should’ve been the end. Until March 23, 2026, ten months after the seashell photo and four months after the professionals had walked away, the FBI suddenly obtained warrants for Comey’s Apple and Google accounts. Those warrants came days before Trump fired his attorney general, and the indictment followed in late April, right as Todd Blanche was angling to replace Pam Bondi. The surveillance did not intensify because a new threat emerged; rather, it appeared to intensify because the political usefulness of nailing Comey increased. The same Todd Blanche whose nomination you helped freeze last week built his audition for attorney general partly on this case.
(By the way, before Comey ever posted, Amazon vendors had sold more than 200,000 products bearing “86 47” or its variants, generating exactly zero federal investigations. The FBI’s own threat database, kept since 2007, also showed no prior instances of “eighty-six” being an assassination threat. Also, a federal judge in Washington recently ruled that protesters’ “86 47” signs are so manifestly, obviously protected speech and not imminent death threats.)
Your average American might shrug all this off. With high prices gobbling up the budgets of working class households, a court case involving a vindictive president feuding with an ex-FBI director who once investigated him sounds like Washington drama, not a kitchen-table concern. But the precedent is not really about Comey. It’s about each of our constitutional rights, the phones in our pockets, and about what we are allowed to say before the government reaches for those devices.
The new details from last week show that the president has given himself the ability to name an enemy, point to that enemy’s free speech, and then wiretap him over it without the approval of any judge. That’s at least three constitutional violations. The First Amendment is supposed to shield the speech. The Fourth is supposed to stand between you and a search like this. And the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments should safeguard any citizen from being selectively and vindictively prosecuted. Here, all three were simply skipped. And if that can be done to a former FBI director with the best lawyers and a national profile, it can be done to virtually anyone.
I don’t write this as a bystander of course. Trump has publicly accused people like me, John Brennan, James Clapper, Adam Schiff, and even Barack Obama and Joe Biden, of treason. I have to assume some of us are already under surveillance for the audacity of criticizing the sitting president, while he has agents hunt for something—anything—to charge us with as punishment. (They’re welcome to my Instagram, where they’ll find more than just mentions of “86 47” but daily broadsides against Trump’s naked corruption, deficient character, and unfitness for office. I won’t stop no matter what they do.) Ironically, one of those criticisms is that I’ve long warned a second Trump term would turn the intelligence apparatus into an instrument of personal revenge and political spying. Again, the wannabe despot in the Oval Office has proven my point.
So here’s the answer to the question in the headline of this essay. We don’t know how many Americans are being warrantlessly monitored right now, or individually targeted despite their constitutional rights. That is the problem. Comey’s surveillance surfaced only because his prosecution forced these documents into open court. Everything about how this administration treats the people it considers enemies tells me his case is the rule, not the exception, and that there may be far more people they’ve decided to watch than to tip their hand by bringing weak and foolish cases.
The Framers gave us the three, aforementioned safeguards for exactly this moment. The First Amendment so a citizen could mock or provoke his leaders without fear… the warrant requirement, the Fourth, because they had lived under a king who searched his subjects at will… and the Fifth and Fourteenth to keep people from being singled out for revenge because they are out of favor with the powerful. In Comey’s case the government ran past all three, punishing the speech and skipping the warrant and going after a Trump critic just because he was a Trump critic—all in a single move.
We are watching a president test whether those protections still exist for any of us. The courts will decide Comey’s fate sooner or later. But the rest of us have to decide, in the years ahead, whether we make the cost of this abuse of power so high that no one dares to repeat it.
Your friend, in defiance,
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