James Comey breaks silence to clarify intent behind '86 47' post
James Comey (pictured) has placed the blame on his wife for what he called a 'totally innocent' Instagram post that some suggested was a coded message calling for the 'assassination of President Trump.' Comey spoke publicly for the first time since the controversy, claiming his wife not only suggested taking the picture but also informed him that the phrase '86' was related to restaurants.
'We stood over it and I said, I think it's some kind of political message and she said, "86 when I was a server... meant to remove an item from the menu when you ran out of ingredients,"' Comey told MSNBC's Nicole Wallace while mentioning that his wife had worked in restaurants. 'And I said, well, to me, as a kid, it always meant to leave a place, to ditch a place. I said, that's really clever,' he added about the supposedly innocent shell formation. 'So then she said, "You should take a picture of that." And I did, and I posted it on my Instagram account and thought nothing more of it.'
But the innocent beachside snap set off a firestorm. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (pictured suggested Comey be arrested and the Secret Service interview him about the post . The Merriam-Webster dictionary says 86 is slang meaning 'to throw out,' 'to get rid of' or 'to refuse service to.' It notes: 'Among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of "to kill." We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.' Numerous Trump administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, asserted that Comey was advocating the assassination of Trump, the 47th president, which he completely dismissed. 'I heard through her that people were saying it was some sort of a call for assassination, which is crazy. But I took it down. Even if I think it's crazy, I don't want to be associated with violence of any kind,' he said.
The long-time Trump antagonist - hated by liberals as well for his reopening of Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal days before the 2016 election - called the Secret Service agents who interviewed him 'total pros.' 'I in the Trump era, I've been investigated a lot, audited a lot, and so it's not my first rodeo. I'm in some strange way, the relationship he can't get over. Maybe because I've lived a happy, productive life since leaving, but this has just been a distraction in that life,' he said. The president - who fired Comey as head of the FBI in his first term - responded to the post himself, referring to Comey as 'a child.' 'I hope people know enough about that particular person that they understand where it's coming from,' Comey said. 'It says something more depressing about the leadership of our current administration. And I just shrug because that's ridiculous.'
When asked about it on Friday during a Fox News interview, Trump said: 'He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant. If you're the FBI director and you don't know what that meant, that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.' He deflected a question on what he thought should happen, saying the decision would be up to Bondi.
The post was deleted on Thursday after it was made, with Comey subsequently writing: 'I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message. I didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.' 'It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,' the now-crime novelist wrote. Trump was wounded by an assassin's bullet at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, and then almost shot at by another would-be assassin at his West Palm Beach, Florida golf course on September 15, 2024.
Trump and Comey have had a fraught relationship dating back nearly a decade. Comey was the FBI director when Trump took office in 2017, having been appointed four years earlier by then-President Barack Obama and serving before that as a senior Justice Department official in President George W. Bush's administration. But the relationship was strained from the start, including after Comey resisted a request by Trump at a private dinner to pledge his personal loyalty to the president - an overture that so unnerved the FBI director that he documented it in a contemporaneous memorandum.
Trump then fired Comey in May 2017 amid an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump's presidential campaign. That inquiry, later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, would ultimately find that while Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the Trump team welcomed the help, there was insufficient evidence to prove a criminal collaboration .
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