(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Former FBI Director James Comey faces a reckoning for allegedly lying to Congress after becoming the first deep-state official linked to the Russia-gate conspiracy to be indicted by a grand jury on Thursday.
Now the floodgates have opened, with Comey’s long history of apparent lies coming under the media microscope, even going back to his days as a college student.
Prominent investigative journalist Paul Sperry said the 6-foot, 8-inch ex-spook falsely claimed to have played basketball for the College of William & Mary, although records disprove the assertion.
James Comey insists he's "innocent" of perjury charges and would never lie, but he has a history of lying dating back to his days at William & Mary. After graduating, the 6'-8" Comey told people he played varsity basketball for W&M. In fact, records show he was never on the team.
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) September 26, 2025
Comey appears, in fact, to have played intramural basketball, but long into his adult life he let people assume that he was on the prestigious Virginia school’s official roster.
In a 2014 interview with W&M’s student newspaper, the Flat Hat, Comey even claimed to have encountered his wife, Patrice Failor, during a hoops session—while acknowledging that her memory of the first meeting differed.
“She leaned over to someone I played basketball with at the gym and said, ‘Who’s that guy?’ and pointed at me,” Comey told the Flat Hat.
Later, after the two were formally introduced at a dorm party, Comey revealed that the chemistry was instant.
“She let me talk about myself for three hours,” he said. “Naturally, I walked away deeply in love with her, because she let me talk about myself, a habit which she has since fixed.”
The lie about his basketball exploits has been known since at least 2018, when Comey admitted in his memoir, A Higher Loyalty, to having come clean about it, according to a Washington Post book review at the time.
“When Comey cops to petty misdeeds, however, the self-criticism—and self-regard—is almost comical,” the Post review said.
According to the National Review, other outlets were just as brutal regarding his contrived confessions.
“The former FBI director is being pilloried from left, right, and center,” it wrote. “Perhaps even worse for him, he is being mocked as a pompous ass from left, right, and center.”
Nonetheless, Comey’s disarmingly blunt candor and self-effacing sense of humor have often been part of his modus operandi, used to launder half-truths and hide his egregious misconduct in plain sight.
he’s like a Bond villain monologuing all his crimes out loud because he thinks Bond will be dead soon and will never get out of the booby trap to do anything about it https://t.co/MktPBruDTf pic.twitter.com/OWW23BwsWV
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 27, 2025
Comey notoriously boasted that he had directed FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka to lay a perjury trap for newly appointed National Security Adviser Michael Flynn during the early weeks of the first Trump administration.
“I sent them,” he told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace during a 2018 panel discussion. “Something I wouldn’t have done—or gotten away with—in a more organized administration … And I thought, ‘It’s early enough. Let’s just send a couple of guys over.’”
Comey has even copped to having an “imposter complex”—a tactic used during public speaking engagements to make him appear more humble and relatable.
But as Vanity Fair reporter Rob Copeland revealed in a 2023 exposé, it is entirely accurate since Comey honed his spycraft not in the intelligence community but in a private investment firm, Bridgewater Associates.
There, he exploited the company’s policy of “radical transparency” to implement and enforce Orwellian measures with “prosecutorial zeal.”
While investigating the romantic dalliance of a female colleague, for example, “Comey seemed to act as if he had gotten Al Capone on tax evasion—once Comey had her in court, he had an excuse to investigate her whole life’s story,” Copeland wrote.
The toxic combination of hubris and guile could prove devastating to Comey’s forthcoming defense.
As longtime investigative reporter Catherine Herridge observed in 2018, he has openly admitted to greenlighting the unauthorized leaks at the heart of his current perjury case—something he denied doing in his 2020 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Catherine Herridge Nails James Comey!!
“The Amazing exchange is when James Comey admitted to you that he shared(leaked) those memos/conversations w/ the President to 3 OTHER PEOPLE…He can call it whatever he wants but that’s a CLASSIFIED SPILL OF INFORMATION…”
What a panel! pic.twitter.com/noPvFvdwCl
— USA NEWS (@USANEWS007) April 27, 2018
Herridge now argues that the charges filed by newly minted U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan—which were rushed to a grand jury in order to prevent the statute of limitations from lapsing—may just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to holding Comey and his co-conspirators accountable.
MORE TO COME @Comey
Based on my two decades covering @fbi @TheJusticeDept a thin indictment suggests a holding charge with the potential of a more complex, superseding indictment that adds more charges.
This is not only possible, but plausible in Comey's case based on the… https://t.co/6oQQbaJwuG pic.twitter.com/cZhlRrQsjF
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) September 26, 2025
There is considerable speculation that conspiracy charges, which have no statute of limitations, may be filed in Florida—likely under the jurisdiction of Judge Aileen Cannon—since the Biden administration’s August 2022 raid on President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach marked the culmination of a yearslong deep-state attempt to frame the president and then cover its tracks by classifying the evidence.
Comey continued to goad Trump over his apparent impunity—right up until his recent indictment.
Comey, taunting Trump two months ago: “I spoke out about him & that despite their absolute best efforts, they’re never able to get me.” pic.twitter.com/OfcUGUwgoA
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 27, 2025
Yet, with the walls of justice finally closing in on him, Comey himself may have put it best in a recent video professing his love for Taylor Swift: “I’ll bet you got pushed around. Somebody made you cold. But the cycle ends right now, ‘Cause you can’t lead me down that road.”
Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
