According to the new indictment, former FBI Director James Comey is being prosecuted for an Instagram post where he wrote the numbers '86/47' in seashells on the beach. This charges Comey with threatening the President, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
FILE PHOTO: FBI Director James Comey waits before testifying at a House Intelligence Committee hearing into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 20, 2017.
Beware what you do with seashells. After a previous attempt to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey , President Donald Trump instructed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to find a new way to prosecute Comey. As part of his audition to be the Attorney General, Blanche has succeeded in finding a new way to satisfy Trump’s ever-present desire to punish his perceived enemies.
Comey wasover an Instagram post from last year showing the numbers “86/47” written in seashells on the beach, with the caption “Cool shell formation on my beach walk. ” According to the new indictment, Comey, whose reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton at the tail end of the 2016 election likely led to Trump’s victory , the seashell’s message was a threat to the President, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
This is the second attempt by the DOJ to prosecute Comey. The first occurred on Sept. 25, 2025, on charges of making a false statement and obstruction related to Comey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020, just days after Trump issued aWhen Blanche recently appeared on NBC, he was confronted with the fact that Amazon lists dozens of products with the term “86/47.
” Blanche conceded that the phrase is used frequently and that not everyone who uses it should be prosecuted. Blanche claimed that the government has much more evidence of Comey’s intent to incite an assassination than the seashells. Still, it sounds like the same double-talk that the DOJ and the Administration think protects them from reality.
As I recall from when I was a waiter as a teenager, the term “86” has a distinct meaning: in the restaurant business, it means the kitchen has run out of a particular dish. Because 86 can mean “to get rid of,” and Trump is the 47th president, prosecutors say the shells’ arrangement means “a reasonable recipient” would interpret the message as “a serious expression of an intent to do harm” to Trump.
It is alarming that the DOJ has sought to prosecute Comey for his “threat,” but the language they rely on to bring the charge is from an older, lower legal standard, one that the Supreme Court explicitly overruled in the 2015 case. Under court rules, prosecutors are obligated to shape the language of their charges to conform to the current state of the law.
Not only should the Comey indictment be dismissed, but any prosecutor who signed off on the prosecution should also be sanctioned. The indictment lacks an essential element of a true threat crime — mainly that the speaker intended to threaten violence, or acted in conscious disregard of the substantial risk that their communication would be viewed as threatening. The Supreme Court has spent decades honing the definition of a threat under the statutes that Comey is charged with violating.
In 1966, Robert Watts said at a protest that he had received his draft letter, and “if they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ. ” He was arrested and charged with threatening President Lyndon B. Johnson.
The Supreme Court said that Watts’s statement constituted political speech, not a bona fide threat.case, in which a Pennsylvania man posted potentially threatening statements online, the Supreme Court further defined what constitutes a threat and what speech is protected under the Constitution — and set the threshold even higher. The Court concluded that the mindset of the person who made the comment must be considered.
It is not enough for the subject of a comment to view it as a threat, they ruled; the person who made it must have intended it that way. , the Supreme Court reaffirmed Elonis and tweaked the definition a bit, saying prosecutors could also prove that the person making the statement understood that there was a substantial risk the comment would be viewed as threatening.
The charges laid out in the Comey indictment do not allege that this threshold was met. Instead, the DOJ cited the legal standard laid out in the Supreme Court’sWhile the Administration denies that the prosecution of Comey is part of Trump’s vengeance tour, claiming that the prosecutions are “driven by law and not by politics,” they follow Trump’s vow during his presidential campaign to seek retribution if reelected.
It is more than troubling that Trump’s assessment of whether someone is guilty is predicated upon vengeance without regard to the law or the facts. This has been his mantra throughout his life. Recall that on May 1, 1989, Trump spent $85,000 on ads in New York newspapers advocating the death penalty for five young men accused of assaulting and raping a jogger in Central Park in New York City. Fortunately, his call for their execution was ignored.
Years later, overwhelming evidence was developed that they were not involved. Only a few weeks ago, it was reported that Trump’s mindset is the same as it was 37 years ago when he suggested the need to reinstitute firing squads. By 2015, political discourse took a darker turn when images of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders getting tossed out of an aircraft began circulating.
Following Charlie Kirk’s murder, Peyton Vanest was fuming about Trump when he grabbed his phone and hit record.
“Somebody should,” he declared, pausing for dramatic effect. “Somebody should, you know? ” “If somebody knew what needed to be done, that person should probably just do it …” the 27-year-old progressive influencer continued, conspicuously not defining “it. ” Vanest uploaded the 62-second video to TikTok, where it accumulated more than 700,000 likes and 3.2 million views.
His version on Instagram garnered another 1.4 million views. Vanest’s plea is part of a social media trend that has twisted the idea of a presidential assassination into a morbid joke. The absurdity of the latest charge against Comey is not lost on anyone but the Trump Administration.
Let’s consider the difference between shells in the sand and Trump’s incendiary words and actions advocating hatred and violence towards his perceived political enemies:in March 2024 that featured an illustration of then-President Joe Biden with his hands and feet tied. In June 2020, during a Presidential debate, when asked to disavow violence by his supporters, Trump asked a known violent group of supporters, the Proud Boys, to “Stand Back and Stand By. ” Trump urged those gathered on January 6, 2021, to storm the Congress to stop the electoral vote count. Indeed, Trump was indicted for his actions on January 6.
Trump has threatened the citizenryTrump has attacked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with derogatory names, including “numbskull,” “knucklehead,” “incompetent,” “crooked,” “moron,” and “an American disgrace. ”Trump and his Vice-President have attacked the Pope as the Anti-Christ.reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROMEthat these remarks were, “A braying authoritarian mob calls for the imprisonment of the other party’s legislative leader days after an attempt to take her hostage and torture her.
What would you say if you saw it in another country? ”] Even Trump’s holiday “greetings” are designed to motivate his supporters against anyone in the Democratic Party: “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY…” and “to all, including the Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country, but are failing badlyThis is, of necessity, a shortened list of Trump’s almost-daily posts and statements.
In some instances, orders to Homeland Security, the DOJ, and the military, suggesting to his supporters that his enemies are their enemies. At least at this moment, Trump cannot put people in a tower as ancient kings did, and order the use of a guillotine, but would if he could. Trump doesn’t seem to appreciate that he is the president of all the people, not just the 35% who think he is Jesus reincarnated.
So, this is a warning for when you are at the beach this summer: Be mindful that if you write something in the sand that Trump views as antagonistic, or build a sand castle , you may be subject to prosecution.
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James Comey Instagram Seashells Threatening The President Prosecution Todd Blanche Seashells Not Shellfishing Amazon 86/47 Prosecution Seashells Not Shellfishing Administration Reality
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