Comey’s Claim That He Didn’t Know What ’86 47′ Meant Doesn’t Hold Up

The smarmiest and most self-righteous of all FBI directors, James Comey, has been indicted again. Fox News reported Tuesday that “the charges appear to be in relation to a May 2025 Instagram photo of an ‘86 47’ shell formation on a beach.” Comey claims that he didn’t know what “86” meant. His explanation of why he shared the photo, however, doesn’t stand up to even the most superficial scrutiny.

Fox explains that “in the slang often used in the service industry, to ‘86’ something means to eject, cancel or get rid of it. Donald Trump is currently the 47th president of the United States.” And in a tacit recognition that he knew he had crossed the line, Comey “removed the post the same day it was uploaded.”

The unctuous deep stater explained: “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.”

Yeah, sure. These days, every other Democrat is calling openly for violence against Trump and his supporters, and the rest will get around to doing so soon enough. And so Trump himself responded: “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.”

Indeed, and if there is any lingering doubt, Comey’s (likely ghostwritten) potboiler crime novel, FDR Drive, removes it once and for all. In May 2025, Comey went on NPR to plug the book, and the propaganda outfit’s Leila Fadel stated: “At the heart of this crime novel are two questions – what is free speech, and what happens when someone’s words incite violence? The book is fiction, but those two questions are front and center to the political climate right now in the United States.”

Comey then explains that his novel is another example of the left’s massive hoax claim that “right-wing extremism” is a major source of violence in the U.S. He says that his book is “about a right-wing podcaster who is trying to motivate his followers to engage in acts of violence against the targets of his vitriol. And it’s about my protagonist, Nora Carleton, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, trying to figure out, how do we stop the violence? And is there a way to hold this podcaster criminally accountable for what he clearly knows he’s doing? And that’s the trick because the line between speech and crime is – it should be clear, but it’s fuzzy.”

It was exactly that “fuzzy” line that Comey thought he was dancing upon when he posted his “86 47” photo. He clearly thought he could incite his slavering, hate-filled leftist followers to violence against Trump, while maintaining plausible deniability.

That deniability, however, becomes significantly harder to maintain when we see Fadel asking him about the “line between free speech and violent incitement and domestic terrorism, ideologically motivated violence.” Comey responds by claiming that he has had to “grapple with that very issue throughout my career.” And now he expects us to believe that he didn’t know what the implications of posting “86 47” were?

That’s what he’s claiming. Asked out the photo, Comey insisted that it was benign: “We were walking on the beach and saw an arrangement of numbers, as you said, in seashells and stopped, trying to figure out what it was. And it was Patrice who first said what you said. She first thought it was an address. Then, as we stared at it, I said, I think it’s a political message. And she said, I remember from – she worked for many years as a server, growing up. That’s a term from the restaurant industry. And so it was she who suggested I take the picture. I thought, that’s great. I took a picture and posted it ’cause I thought it was a clever political thing. Never occurred to me that someone would try to say it was associated with violence. I actually still don’t see that. But I took it down because I don’t want – I mean, this is my Instagram account, for God’s sakes. I don’t want anything on there to be associated with violence, even if I don’t get it.”

So here is a man who wrote, or more likely had written for him, a novel about veiled calls to violence, claiming that he didn’t know what he posted was a veiled call to violence. Sure, and Old Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, too.