‘Like feeding seagulls at the beach’: Ex-FBI chief calls media flying rats in testimony

Explaining to the Senate why he chose to leak his notes about meetings with President Donald Trump through a personal friend, former FBI Director James Comey had some fun at the media’s expense, comparing reporters staking out his house to beach seagulls.

Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, a month after he was fired by Trump, Comey said he handed his memos to a friend – identified by CNN as Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman – because the media were camped in his driveway.

“I was actually going out of town with my wife to hide, and I was worried it would be like feeding seagulls at the beach,” Comey said, drawing chuckles from the gallery.

The “ground-nesting carnivores, which take live food or scavenge opportunistically,” as Wikipedia puts it, have long been the bane of beach-goers. Some of the reporters, however, seemed to embrace the term, while Comey’s moment of levity prompted many a joke on social media.

Later in the hearing, Comey noted that many stories in the media – including that about Russia – were “just dead wrong.” He agreed with Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) that a February 14 New York Times article about alleged ties between Trump aides and Russia was “almost entirely wrong.”