WASHINGTON (AP) — Former FBI Director James Comey was set to be interviewed by the Secret Service on Friday about a social media post that Republicans insisted was a call for violence against President Donald Trump, according to a law enforcement official.
The interview is part of an ongoing Trump administration investigation and is expected to help investigators assess the purpose and intent of the post and whether Comey intended to communicate a threat to the president, which he flatly denied. Any decision on whether charges should be filed would be up to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump said Friday, though there’s a high bar in proving that comments or posts amount to direct threats of violence.
The official who confirmed the interview, which is standard for the Secret Service while investigating comments perceived as potentially threatening, was not authorized to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.
At issue is an Instagram post from Thursday in which Comey wrote “cool shell formation on my beach walk” under a picture of seashells that appeared to form the shapes for “86 47.”
Merriam-Webster, the dictionary used by The Associated Press, 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. FBI Director Kash Patel said the bureau was also supporting the investigation.
Asked about it 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 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.
Trump and Comey have had a fraught dynamic 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 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.
