{"id":49540,"date":"2026-08-04T13:29:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T20:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=49540"},"modified":"2026-08-04T13:29:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T20:29:20","slug":"how-many-other-trump-enemies-are-being-warrantlessly-wiretapped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/08\/04\/how-many-other-trump-enemies-are-being-warrantlessly-wiretapped\/","title":{"rendered":"How many other Trump enemies are being warrantlessly wiretapped?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The government’s own agents put it in writing that tracking James Comey was illegal. They did it anyway.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Miles Taylor<\/a> Aug 3\u2219Preview<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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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 \u201c86 47.\u201d That photograph is the entire basis for a federal prosecution that\u2019s intended to send him to prison for up to a decade.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

What happened next, laid bare in court filings<\/a> 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s what we now know about a case that was already outlandish before an indictment was even issued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cmeant assassination.\u201d<\/a> By that afternoon, a senior Justice Department official, identified in the filings only as \u201cthe number three guy at DOJ,\u201d wanted the Secret Service to ping Comey\u2019s cellphone and track his location in real time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Secret Service\u2019s own supervisor put his objection in writing. Pinging the phone \u201ccould be done,\u201d he warned, \u201cbut it would be a bad idea.\u201d<\/a> Warrantless emergency tracking requires an imminent threat to life, and \u201cwe did not believe that anyone\u2019s life was in immediate danger.\u201d It was, in his words, \u201clegally questionable.\u201d His boss agreed, according to the emails, \u201cbut said we might do it anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And they did. The next day, an agent filled out a form<\/a> telling Verizon the government faced \u201can emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury,\u201d certified that this was \u201ctrue and correct,\u201d and got Comey\u2019s 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<\/a> 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 \u201ca hot topic on the plane,\u201d that Trump was \u201cvery interested,\u201d and wanted Comey\u2019s interview notes in hand for his six o\u2019clock press conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s life from James Comey (because of course there wasn\u2019t) and no basis whatsoever for any charges. That should\u2019ve 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\u2019s Apple and Google accounts. Those warrants came days before Trump fired his attorney general, and the indictment<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(By the way, before Comey ever posted, Amazon vendors had sold more than 200,000 products<\/a> bearing \u201c86 47\u201d or its variants, generating exactly zero federal investigations. The FBI\u2019s own threat database, kept since 2007, also showed no prior instances of \u201ceighty-six\u201d being an assassination threat. Also, a federal judge in Washington recently ruled<\/a> that protesters\u2019 \u201c86 47\u201d signs are so manifestly, obviously protected speech and not imminent death threats.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new details from last week show that the president has given himself the ability to name an enemy, point to that enemy\u2019s free speech, and then wiretap him over it without the approval of any judge. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t 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\u2014anything\u2014to charge us with as punishment. (They\u2019re welcome to my Instagram, where they\u2019ll find more than just mentions of \u201c86 47\u201d but daily broadsides against Trump\u2019s naked corruption, deficient character, and unfitness for office. I won\u2019t stop no matter what they do.) Ironically, one of those criticisms is that I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So here\u2019s the answer to the question in the headline of this essay. We don\u2019t know how many Americans are being warrantlessly monitored right now, or individually targeted despite their constitutional rights. That is the problem. Comey\u2019s 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\u2019ve decided to watch than to tip their hand by bringing weak and foolish cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2026 the warrant requirement, the Fourth, because they had lived under a king who searched his subjects at will\u2026 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\u2019s 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\u2014all in a single move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are watching a president test whether those protections still exist for any of us. The courts will decide Comey\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your friend, in defiance,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miles Taylor<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The government’s own agents put it in writing that tracking James Comey was illegal. They did it anyway. Miles Taylor Aug 3\u2219Preview 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… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1879],"tags":[2328],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49540"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49543,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49540\/revisions\/49543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}