Comey Don’t Play That: Former FBI Goon Writes Crime Novel About Saving the World from MAGA ‘Mouth Breathers’

James Comey is still writing crime novels, apparently. The only reason anyone knows this is because just days before the release of Comey’s third book, FDR Drive (currently ranked 113th in the “Women Sleuths” category on Amazon), the former FBI goon posted a photo of some seashells he claimed to have “found” on the beach that spelled out “8647,” the anti-Trump (and assassination-adjacent) rallying cry that anyone in Comey’s milieu of smug Rachel Maddow fans would instantly recognize. The ensuing online uproar gave media bookers an extra incentive to invite Comey on their shows to plug his stupid book. Most observers saw it as a shameless plea for attention, which it obviously was. Except Comey denies this, and no one from the FBI would ever lie.

FDR Drive is the latest installment in a series starring protagonists Nora Carleton (aka “Ms. Smooth”), a brilliant federal prosecutor and “rule-of-law social liberal” who recently became a lesbian, and Benny Dugan (aka “Mr. Rough”), a hard-charging old-school investigator and recovering alcoholic who recently became woke. Having successfully taken down the Italian mob in an earlier book, the dynamic duo set their sights on an even bigger threat: MAGA white supremacy. Sam Buchanan is a right-wing podcaster who was born in the South, which explains his racism, but went on to attend prep school in New Hampshire before getting two degrees at Harvard. He’s a MAGA wingnut who hates liberals, minorities, immigrants, and gays, so naturally he lives and works in Midtown Manhattan.

Buchanan is notorious for riling up his followers by saying “crazy shit.” For example, one of Nora’s associates explains in a briefing, the right-wing lunatic has accused Democrats of wanting to “open the borders, ban fossil fuels, regulate the duration of home bathroom showers, take guns away, ban Christian holidays, and use schools to teach kids to be gay and androgynous.” Crazy! The feds are determined to prosecute Buchanan for conspiring to commit hate crimes after his supporters viciously attacked some liberal activists he verbally denounced on his show. Things really kick off when Buchanan’s junior producer is gunned down after accusing her boss of murder on the air, and the senior producer, a sick pedophile named Herb, goes missing.

The plot unfolds like a bad Law & Order episode. The characters, even the main ones, are emotionally vacant drones who all get along and are cloyingly agreeable, constantly referring to each other as “my beloved” something or other. Benny Dugan steals the show as the grizzled ex-cop with a heart of gold who isn’t afraid to cry thick, manly tears and is eager to learn how to pronounce “Mx.,” the nonbinary honorific. “More opportunities for growth,” he bellows in his “Brooklyn baritone.” At one point he avoids a violent confrontation by remembering the breathing exercises he learned in anger management counseling. He makes a reference to Lisa Leslie, the former WNBA “star,” and rarely ends a sentence without a variation of the phrase, “or some shit.” Dugan has no time for those who criticize the FBI’s relentless prosecution of anyone who set foot in the Capitol building on January 6, but he’s also quick to acknowledge—in his overwrought, cliché-driven parlance—that the bureau is rife with systemic racism. “If this was some Muslim dude saying the shit Buchanan’s been saying—with bodies fallin’—the FBI’d be on him like white on rice,” he grumbles.

Comey is presumably trying to make an argument about free speech, but it’s not clear what that is beyond a brooding lament that authorities should be doing more to stop the people he doesn’t like from saying things he doesn’t agree with, even if it means utilizing sketchy tactics or even breaking the law. Nora and her team of prosecutors base their case against Buchanan, who is arrested and denied bail with ruthless efficiency, on the airtight legal theory that the MAGA podcaster “had to know his words would result in the attacks.” (Italics in original.)

Just in case, they deploy a manipulative jailhouse snitch with a checkered past to secretly record him appearing to admit his guilt. They are eventually tasked with building another case against Buchanan’s financial backer, an obscure timber magnate supervillain who is shorting the American economy and secretly wants the country to collapse so he can use the profits to rebuild society into a MAGA paradise. They are only able to do so because Buchanan’s defense attorney, a nice woke guy who hates his “guilty piece of shit” client and his following of “mouth breathers married to their first cousins,” commits legal malpractice and ultimately lies under oath. But the good guys won, so who cares?

In Comey’s defense, being a mediocre anti-Trump crime novelist is significantly more honorable than being a mediocre anti-Trump pundit who appears on MSNBC several times a week to recite stale talking points about why [the most recent thing Trump said or did] is a “threat to democracy.” Nevertheless, FDR Drive reads like something ChatGPT would spit out if you asked it to write a crime novel based on the last several years of MSNBC programming, from its sloppy caricatures of Trump supporters to its preening self-righteousness and lack of self-awareness. Nora, the brilliant lesbian prosecutor, delivers what is supposed to be a touching monologue about how some people (the ones James Comey thinks are evil bigots) insist on “dividing the world into groups” because it “helps them feel better about themselves and better than the groups they create.” These MAGA idiots should realize that being part of a “tribe” doesn’t mean putting everyone else down.

Did Comey actually read (or even write) his own book? He recently told Jen Psaki, the former Biden press secretary who has seamlessly transitioned into her new role as MSNBC host, that “one of the two political parties is—let me put it nicely—white supremacist adjacent, at a minimum.” In the acknowledgments, Comey writes of wanting to restore “kindness and decency” in the public square. It’s not entirely clear how lumping half the country into a group of irredeemable racists will help him achieve this goal. Asked to clarify or defend his comments—in the children’s section of a northern Virginia bookstore—Comey valiantly pled the fifth. “I don’t want to answer that,” he said.

Recent events make Comey’s latest work feel—let me put it nicely—quaintly delusional. There is a real-life example of an Ivy League grad arrested for killing someone deemed a political enemy: Luigi Mangione (Penn ’20) has been lionized by Taylor Lorenz and other left-wing lunatics, including a top aide to Zohran Mamdani, the likely future mayor of New York City who wants to “globalize the intifada.” On a related note, two Israeli embassy workers were gunned down by a radical leftist shouting “Free Palestine” in May. Earlier this month, more than a dozen peaceful protesters were injured in a makeshift flamethrower attack by a lunatic who wanted to “kill all Zionist people.” In 2024, Ryan Wesley Routh echoed MSNBC talking points in a manifesto outlining his motivation for trying to assassinate Trump.

There’s a pivotal scene in FDR Drive that takes place at a United Nations rally to “celebrate global unity”—one of many examples of language that reads like a satirical send-up of liberal sanctimony, but probably wasn’t intended as such given the author’s history of partisan derangement. A more realistic version of this scene might involve violent protests, burning cars, and random looting ahead of the Israeli prime minister’s speech. Benny Dugan gets another opportunity for growth courtesy of a keffiyeh-clad they/them who explains the real meaning of “from the river to the sea” in the context of post-capitalist anticolonial resistance paradigms.

FDR Drive: A Crime Novel
by James Comey
Mysterious Press, 336 pp., $30

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