A combination of file photos show U.S. President Donald Trump in the White House in Washington, DC, U.S. April 9, 2018 and former FBI Director James Comey on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 8, 2017
On Tuesday, it was announced that former FBI director James Comey has been indicted by the Justice Department for a second time. The charges have yet to be revealed officially, but are reportedly tied to a 2025 social media post in which Comey shared a picture of seashells spelling out the numbers “86 47.”
According to those in the orbit of President Donald Trump, these shells were an intentional threat to kill the Commander in Chief, under the logic that “86” can mean to ban, remove, or kill someone, while Trump is the 47th president. But as CNN reporter Aaron Blake points out, a couple of key problems will make it impossibly difficult for the DOJ to prove its case.
“The main problem with indicting Comey over ‘86 47,’” notes Blake, “is that it's not self-evidently a threat. ‘86’ has plenty of non-threatening meanings. During Biden years, it was used to mean impeachment. The second problem is that recent Supreme Court precedent means prosecutors need to show Comey had ‘some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of his statements.’ When informed of the potential threatening meaning, Comey said he didn't know that and deleted it.”
“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” Comey wrote in the original post, and as Blake points out, the former FBI director then immediately removed it after learning of its possible significance. Comey said that he came across the shells already in place and did not arrange them himself.
Even so, Trump and his allies weren’t buying it. “Just James Comey casually calling for my dad to be murdered,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, posted afterwards. And the president himself asserted that Comey “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.”
But according to Mary Anne Franks, a professor at the George Washington Law School and expert on free speech, “The claim that this is a threat is laughable under any standard.” In fact, courts have held for decades that “‘crude political hyperbole’ about the president does not constitute a true threat.”
Comey has long been the target of the president, ever since his involvement in the investigation into Russia’s attempts to meddle with the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. During his first term, Trump fired Comey, went on to publicly push for his prosecution, then in 2025, finally pressed the DOJ to indict him under allegations of lying to Congress. This indictment was ultimately thrown out by a judge.
“I know that Donald Trump will probably come after me again,” Comey said at the time. “My attitude is going to be the same: I’m innocent. I am not afraid. And I believe in an independent federal judiciary.”
Now, once again facing that judiciary, experts say Comey has little to worry about.
“We have not seen the indictment, of course,” says Blake. “Maybe there is some silver bullet piece of evidence here. But we've certainly seen the DOJ chase indictments of Trump's foes based on very little.”
