House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) suggested during a Fox News interview Friday night that former FBI director James Comey may have been attempting to incite “some kind of coup or some type of insurrection” against President Trump with a now-deleted social media post that read “86 47.”
“Look they’re losing their minds over Trump’s success in securing the border, and all the things the media said President Trump couldn’t do that he did in the first three weeks of his term,” Comer told former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who is now a Fox News personality. “It has made people like Comey very anxious now, and who knows what led to the decision to post that picture?”
The Secret Service interviewed Comey on Friday amid GOP outrage over a photo he posted on Instagram on Thursday that showed seashells on a beach spelling out “86 47.” Trump, his top allies and other Republicans have accused Comey of calling for the 47th president’s assassination.
Comey, 64, has denied that the social media post was a call for Trump’s death and clarified in a follow-up statement that he “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 down the post,” he wrote.
The term “86” is typically understood as slang for rejecting or throwing out something or someone.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed in a post on the social platform X that Comey agreed to a voluntary interview at the Secret Service’s Washington Field Office on Friday.
Comer told Chaffetz that his opinion of the former FBI chief “is so bad” that he didn’t know what to make of the intent behind Comey’s post.
“Everything that he was involved in that I was involved in investigating, there were mistakes made, there were lies told, there was incompetence demonstrated at every step of the way,” the Kentucky Republican said. “I could see that he made a simple mistake, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that was intentional.”
