Secret Service made 'legally bad' decision to surveil Comey: court docs

The Government’s Panic Was the StoryThe Target Was Not the PostThe source article wants to linger on James Comey’s Instagram and the weirdness of “86-47.” That is the distraction. The real political fact is that federal power was reportedly used to track a former FBI director by cellphone and build a criminal case around a social media post, while his defense says law enforcement did not believe anyone was in immediate danger.This is not a neutral public-safety story. It is a story about who gets to turn ambiguity into suspicion, and who gets to decide when surveillance is “exigency” and when it is just naked overreach.Power Sat With the GovernmentThe institutional power in this story is obvious: law enforcement, the DOJ, and the machinery that can indict, surveil, and force a target to spend money and attention defending himself. Comey may have posted the image, but the state made the choice to escalate it into a federal case.According to the filing, the government tracked him as he drove from North Carolina to northern Virginia shortly after the post. The defense says that kind of warrantless “ping” requires an imminent threat to life or limb. If the official inside the system is quoted correctly, then the government knew the threshold was not met and moved anyway.“Public Safety” As PretextThat is the oldest trick in federal policing: treat a political irritation like a security emergency, then retroactively dress the move up as caution. The filing’s claim that an anonymous official said “it was a bad idea to ping the phone” matters because it suggests the government understood the weakness of its own justification.This is what selective prosecution looks like when stripped of euphemism. The charge is not just about law. It is about status, resentment, and the decision to use exceptional tools against someone the government wants punished.Vindictiveness With PaperworkThe defense’s argument that the case is vindictive and selective is not ornament. The 76-page spreadsheet of insults between Trump and Comey is a blunt record of the political feud that sits under the prosecution. That context does not prove every legal claim by itself, but it does expose the atmosphere in which the case was built: grievance wearing a badge.The article’s framing is weak because it treats the bizarre details as the central mystery. The mystery is not why Comey used a clumsy meme. The mystery is why the state apparently needed a warrantless surveillance move and a federal indictment to respond to it.The Pattern Is FamiliarThis is how institutions rot: not all at once, but by normalizing extraordinary measures against politically convenient targets. A high-level DOJ request, an “illegal electronic surveillance” allegation, and an indictment over a post that the defense says is protected speech all point in the same direction. The system is not merely enforcing rules; it is selecting enemies.That is the larger pattern. When federal power starts chasing symbolic offense as though it were imminent violence, it stops protecting democracy and starts teaching political punishment in the language of law. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe