The former FBI director posted — then deleted — a picture of seashells forming “8647.” Trump and his allies view it as a call for his assassination, but Comey says he was unaware of that meaning.
The Trump administration is investigating former FBI Director James Comey over a social media post that some government officials and supporters of President Trump are interpreting as a threat to the president.
On Thursday, Comey shared a picture on Instagram of seashells on a beach arranged into the numbers “8647.” The caption read: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”
“Eighty-six” is a slang term that means “get rid of”, and Trump is the 47th (and 45th) president of the United States. According to Merriam-Webster, the most common meaning of 86 — which has its roots in the service industry — is to “throw out” or “refuse service to” a customer. The dictionary notes that the term has also come to mean “to kill.” But the dictionary says it does not include this meaning in the official entry “due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”
The post sparked uproar among some Republicans, who suggested Comey was threatening the president. Donald Trump Jr. accused him of “calling for my dad to be murdered.”
But Comey, who deleted the photo within hours, said he assumed the shells were a “political message”, not a violent one. It’s unclear who created the shell formation.
Comey has been an outspoken critic of Trump since he led the FBI during the president’s first term. Trump fired Comey in 2017, four years into his ten-year term, as he was overseeing an investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence”, Comey wrote on Instagram. “It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”
Several Republican politicians are calling for Comey to face consequences ranging from an investigation to an arrest. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced late Thursday that her department and the Secret Service are “investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.” NPR has reached out to Comey for comment and did not receive a response before publication of this story.
Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told NPR on Friday that the agency is aware of Comey’s post and takes “rhetoric like this very seriously.
