The hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” slammed the Trump administration Wednesday morning for bringing another round of criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey, calling the indictment “just preposterous.”
Comey has been charged, among other things, with threatening the life of President Trump for posting a picture on his Instagram account last year of sea shells arranged on a beach to spell “8647.” MAGA figures like Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche have argued that the phrase uses restaurant lingo and Trump’s presidential number to call for the killing of the president. New York Times opinion writer and frequent “Morning Joe” panelist David French pushed back on that assertion.
“I’m a former waiter, like a lot of people in this country, and when you say ’86’ something, you mean get rid of it,” French said. “You would hear ’86 the chocolate lava cake.’ It means we’re out of chocolate lava cake. It doesn’t mean brutally murder the cake. I mean, it’s an absurd analogy, or it’s an absurd stretch, to say this is somehow a threat.”
“Morning Joe” co-anchor Willie Geist, meanwhile, called out MAGA supporters who talked endlessly about “weaponization of the government” during the Biden administration and yet have remained silent now.
“I mean, here it is right in front of you,” Geist said, adding, “Not to mention just the abject waste of time to have the acting attorney general, the head of the FBI, investigating this, holding press conferences. Go work on the Epstein Files! Go get after the important things that are happening in this country. It’s just preposterous.”
You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment yourself below.
“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough lamented the “hypocrisy” of the Trump administration over its targeting of Comey, as well as the uproar from MAGA figures like First Lady Melania Trump over a joke Jimmy Kimmel told on his late night series last week about her having the “glow of an expectant widow.”
“It is crazy. You have, again, the hypocrisy of JD Vance, hypocrisy of all these so-called Free Speech warriors,” Scarborough observed. “I await the reams and reams of stories that will be coming out of The Free Press about indicting somebody for seashells, or trying to pull ABC’s license for somebody telling a joke that has probably been told in the Catskills and in comedian clubs for 100 years about an Autumn-Spring romance.”
“It was ill-advisable. It was probably a stupid thing for him to do,” Scarborough added of Comey’s Instagram post. “But at the same time, again, the Supreme Court’s already spoken on this issue. All of these hypocrites in MAGA world that have just clutched their pearls and fallen on their fainting couches time and time again about, ‘Oh, the Left doesn’t respect free speech.’ We said the same thing on college campuses. We agree!”
“But their response to that is to not respect Free Speech and literally arrest people for taking a picture of seashells and putting it up on Instagram,” Scarborough concluded. “That’s how hypocritical [they are].”
