Donald Trump made a bizarre reference to former FBI director James Comey when the topic of Jimmy Lai was raised ahead of the president’s trip to China.
While taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, the 79-year-old gave a rambling response on whether he would discuss the jailed Hong Kong pro-democracy media tycoon when he meets with China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
Lai, founder of the now-shuttered Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in February after being convicted of two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one count of publishing seditious material. The outspoken critic of China was accused of violating Hong Kong’s controversial national security law — which largely criminalized dissent against the Chinese Communist Party — by using his newspaper to lobby governments to impose sanctions and other punitive measures on China and Hong Kong.
Trump vowed he would discuss Lai’s imprisonment with Xi while also making a strange detour to mention his old nemesis, Comey.
“Jimmy Lai, you know, he caused a lot of bedlam,” Trump said. “It’s like saying to me, ‘If Comey ever went to jail, would you let him out?’ It might be a hard one. Does that make sense? It might be hard because he’s a dirty cop.
“But Jimmy Lai is in that way,” Trump added. “Jimmy Lai caused lots of turmoil for China. He tried to do the right thing. He wasn’t successful. Went to jail, and people would like him out, and I’d like to see him get out too. So I’ll bring him up.”
Trump’s Department of Justice is trying to prosecute Comey over a highly disputed claim that he threatened the president’s life by posting an image of seashells arranged on a beach to read “86 47” in May 2025.
Prosecutors allege that Comey used the phrase “86″ to mean to kill Trump, instead of the slang term used by the hospitality industry, meaning to remove an item or eject a customer. The “47” is referring to Trump being the 47th U.S. president.
Comey, whom Trump fired from the FBI in 2017, was previously charged with making a false statement to Congress regarding leaks tied to the Russiagate investigation. However, the case fell apart when a judge ruled last November that Trump’s hand-picked prosecutor, former beauty queen Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed.
The jailing of the outspoken China critic was widely seen as a draconian attack on freedom of the press.
Prosecutors accused Lai of publishing seditious material through Apple Daily’s reporting supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Lai also took part in large-scale protests across Hong Kong in 2019.
In an interview with Hugh Hewitt on the Salem News Channel last week, Trump said there was “a little bitterness” between China and Lai, but also promised he would raise the activist’s imprisonment during his Beijing trip.
