Former FBI director James Comey has been confirmed as the owner of this secretive Twitter account

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Former FBI Director James Comey's secret Twitter account has been outed by a close friend.

• The @FormerBu Twitter account that has been active since March has been confirmed to belong to former FBI Director James Comey.
• The account shows Comey in Iowa, raising speculation he may be running for president in 2020.

An anonymous Twitter account with 39,000 followers but only 6 tweets was confirmed to be former FBI Director James Comey after the user tweeted a picture of Comey standing on a road in Iowa.

Comey's close friend Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and editor in chief of national security blog Lawfare, confirmed that the account, with the handle @FormerBu and name Reinhold Niebuhr, was in fact the former FBI director's.

"Ok, in light of this latest tweet, I will confirm that @FormerBu is, in fact, James Comey himself," Wittes tweeted on Monday.

Twitter/@benjaminwittes

Comey's friend Benjamin Wittes confirmed he was Reinhold Niebuhr on Twitter

Speculation had been circling for months about whether the account was being run by Comey, and even before his online identity was confirmed, Twitter users had already raised the possibility that the director, who was fired by President Donald Trump in May, might be running for president.

On October 2o, @FormerBu posted a picture of himself in a cornfield with the caption "Good to be back in Iowa," and Twitter exploded with users claiming this as evidence that Comey would running in the 2020 presidential election. Comey himself has neither confirmed nor denied these claims.

Comey's Twitter name, Reinhold Niebuhr, is the name of an American liberal theologian who died in 1971. Comey wrote his senior thesis at the College of William and Mary partially on Niebuhr, and has been described as a fan of his work.