Former FBI director James Comey has been indicted again – this time over the ’86 47′ seashell mail
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Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted again on Tuesday, this time in an investigation into a social media photo of seashells that officials say are a threat to US President Donald Trump, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The criminal charge is the second in a months-long case against Comey and is part of an ongoing effort by the Trump administration’s Justice Department to prosecute political opponents of the Republican president.
This photo of the sea shells was posted almost a year ago, but the case was discovered as acting US attorney general Todd Blanche, Trump’s former lawyer, aims to prove to the president that he is the right person to hold the job forever.
The fact that the Justice Department pursued a new case against the former FBI director months after a separate and unrelated conviction could open the government to prosecution and retaliation claims and arguments that it is going out of its way to target Comey.
The former FBI director was in charge of the first months of the investigation into whether the 2016 Republican presidential campaign colluded with Russia to sway the results of that year’s election.
Comey was fired by Trump a few months into his first term as president, and they have been feuding publicly ever since.
In what appears to be an increase in attacks by US President Donald Trump on his political enemies, former FBI director James Comey has been charged with criminal charges. Nationally, CBC’s Lyndsay Duncombe lays out a timeline of how it got to this point.
The charges in Comey’s latest case, confirmed to The Associated Press by a person not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, were not yet known. A lawyer for Comey did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, and a spokeswoman for the Justice Department did not immediately comment.
The prosecution stems from May’s Instagram post, in which Comey shared a photo of seashells he saw while walking the “86 47” show. He said he thought the numbers reflected a political message, not a call for violence. Comey deleted the post shortly after it was made, writing: “I didn’t realize that some people associate those numbers with violence” and “I am against violence of any kind so I removed the post.”
However, Comey was immediately interviewed by the Secret Service after Trump administration officials asserted that he was instigating the assassination of Trump, the 47th president.
Suspicious meaning
Merriam-Webster, the dictionary used by the AP, says 86 is slang for “to throw,” “to finish” or “to refuse service.” It notes: “Among the later accepted senses there is a logical extension of the earlier ones, with the meaning ‘to kill.’ We do not include this concept, due to its relative status and limited use.”
Trump, in an interview with Fox News Channel in May, accused Comey of knowing “exactly what that means.”
“The kid knows what that meant,” Trump said. “If you’re the director of the FBI and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination. And it said it loud and clear.”
A day after the indictment of former FBI director James Comey, US President Donald Trump suggested that some of his enemies may follow suit. Democrats were quick to sound the alarm in response, calling it ‘America’s darkest day.’
The former FBI director was indicted in September on charges of perjury and obstruction of Congress related to testimony he gave in 2020 about whether he had authorized insider information about the investigation to be given to a reporter. He pleaded not guilty, and the case was dismissed after a judge ruled that the prosecutor who brought the case was wrongfully accused.
Comey was the director of the FBI when Trump took office in 2017, appointed by then US president Barack Obama, a Democrat. Prior to that, he served as a senior Justice Department official in the Republican George W. Bush administration.
But relations with Trump were strained from the beginning, including after Comey rejected Trump’s request at a dinner to pledge his loyalty to the president — an idea that so dismayed the FBI director that he wrote it into a memo at the time.
Trump fired Comey in May 2017 amid an FBI investigation into possible ties between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign. That investigation, later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, will ultimately find that while Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the Trump team accepted help, there was not enough evidence to prove criminal collusion.
Prosecution of political crimes
Blanche was promoted earlier this month from deputy attorney general to acting attorney general, replacing Pam Bondi, who had frustrated Trump with the department’s struggles to build successful criminal cases against his opponents.
Blanche has moved quickly to announce political prosecutions, including last week’s lawsuit against the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, which the Justice Department accused of defrauding donors by paying confidential informants to infiltrate hate groups. The group has denied wrongdoing.
Comey is among Trump’s many enemies to face in the past year.
The Department of Justice, for example, is pursuing a criminal investigation into former CIA director John Brennan, a key figure in the Russia investigation — one of Trump’s biggest grievances and the proverbial one he and his supporters are now seeking revenge on. Brennan has denied doing anything wrong.
CNN was the first to report the second indictment against Comey.
