When Comey becomes Corney?

Yesterday, the DOJ website published the report from OIG Horowitz, in the form of a PDF file. Former FBI Director James Comey is mentioned more than 140 times in this document. Every time the name Comey appears, the actual text spells “Corney”. The actual text is what one searches when using the “Find” function in the PDF document. A search for “Corney” returns 140+ results while a search for “Comey” returns 0 results. This consistent and intentional misspelling of Comey’s name exists in many files posted on government websites, since at least 2018.

Notice that this “mistake” does not occur because ‘rn’ looks exactly like ‘m’ in the used font. It doesn’t. It seems that somebody or something (sabotaged software) is not only changing Comey to Corney, but is also further manipulating the font by decreasing the space between ‘r’ and ‘n’ to make ‘rn’ look like ‘m’. Further investigation is needed.

This suggests the possibility of intentional sabotage by the IT staff (which is likely held over from the Obama administration). Needless to say, sabotage indicates the presence of saboteur(s), who might subvert other parts of the IT infrastructure of Congress and the White House.

Direct effects of this misspelling of Comey’s name:

different people see different versions of the document; that causes confusion and accusation of conspiracy theory
the documents cannot be found and produced in legal discovery and/or responses to FOIA requests
the documents cannot be found in a Google search for Comey
the incorrect spelling is frequently copied and pasted into other documents

I cannot say at this moment where in the “chain of custody” of a document this change is made. It might be made by sabotaged software when documents are uploaded to the government websites.