💬 The Rubin Recap: The Sunday return to normalcy

Normal people are back in charge in America

Welcome back to the Sunday “Return to Normalcy” edition of The Rubin Recap.

You know that I gave The Rubin Report a new slogan recently. “A show for normal people.” And normalcy has been the focus of this Sunday edition of the newsletter. Good news: If you subscribe to this newsletter and watch The Rubin Report, you, my friend, can rest easy because you are a normal person.

Sometimes in order to appreciate normal, though, you’ve got to recognize what’s not normal, which brings me to the former director of the FBI, James Comey. Comey was subpoenaed by the Justice Department this week for his role in helping to amplify the misinformation contained in the infamous Steele Dossier, which was the basis for the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax after Trump won in 2016. It’s excellent that the Trump administration is probing what Comey was up to. The impacts of his antics were far-reaching, affecting many in Trump’s orbit in addition to Trump himself.

Also, James Comey is not normal.

Comey does a weekly vlog on Substack, and this week he posted a video of himself telling a story about once being in an important FBI briefing with agents and suddenly breaking into singing a Beyoncé song and leaving those around him in the conference room awkwardly stunned.

Now, an aide later explained to Comey that, yes, March Madness did begin this week, but March Madness doesn’t mean you go online and confess to having subjected coworkers to insane behavior. 🤣 March Madness is just an interesting nickname for a basketball tournament, Comey was told.

(We didn’t do a “This Week On The Internet” segment since I’m on the road in Budapest, but I had to get at least one joke about Comey out.)

If you haven’t seen the video, take a moment and watch it.

What a positively strange thing to do. This was the director of the FBI leading a briefing. Not some professor of underwater lesbian basket weaving — who, frankly, probably wouldn’t even do something so weird.

Can you imagine being an FBI agent, and working on that Sandcastles briefing, only to have Comey act so bizarrely? It’s no wonder his colleagues reacted with stunned silence.

What’s even stranger than engaging in such weird behavior is then going online and admitting to having done so in a video confession. None of that is normal. In fact, I’m having a hard time getting over how abnormal both of those acts are.

Frankly, this is more embarrassing than the fake “pee tape” Comey tried shake Trump down with and make Americans believe existed. The timing of it is also suspect. His subpoena was reportedly served to him last week, meaning he new it would eventually be in the news this week — after he posted this oddball video.

Trump must’ve quickly gotten the sense that Comey’s not normal, because he fired him less than six months into his first term. The guy who replaced him wasn’t so normal either. As far as I know, he hasn’t confessed to singing pop songs while in important meetings, but he also was guilty of spreading misinformation about Trump.

Contrast those two clowns with the man leading the FBI right now under Trump 2.0. You might even say, “Dave, it was a little over the top for Kash Patel to have been chugging beers with the Olympic hockey team after their big win.” Sure, maybe it was. I’m not going to argue one way or the other on that one.

But what I will say is that behavior was on the normal end of the spectrum for an American male: a sports fan showing his passion for victory and patriotism for his country. And look at how Kash has handled some major cases that have come along in his first year leading the FBI, like the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie. The guy is far more normal than his two predecessors.

Comey’s weird admission about singing Beyoncé is hardly his only abnormal behavior on social media. It wasn’t that long ago, you’ll recall, that he made that ridiculous “8647” post on Instagram and then tried to plead ignorance that he had no idea what it meant. Not normal.

I hope you appreciate how much more normal Kash is than Comey. Props to Trump for bringing normal people back to the administration and his Cabinet. Might have to do a compare-and-contrast of Marco Rubio and Antony Blinken next.

New York Post columnist Miranda Devine on Hunter Biden

Speaking of people who aren’t normal, is there anyone less normal than the crack-smoking, hooker-banging, former Burisma board member and first child Hunter Biden? Folks, people don’t get more abnormal than Hunter Biden. Miranda Devine of The New York Post and I talked all about her breaking the Hunter Biden laptop story back in 2020, just weeks before Election Day. A story that had it not been suppressed likely would’ve changed the election outcome. She explained how Rudy Giuliani’s team provided the hard drive weeks before and the damning the emails pointing toward Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s foreign business dealings. We also talked about the mainstream media’s reluctance to cover the story and social media platforms colluding to suppress it. Those were wild times in 2020 — far from normal. And much of it has never been told before. Buckle up.