James Comey indicted over alleged Trump threat in cryptic social media post
Former FBI Director James Comey made his first court appearance Wednesday in a criminal case against him that legal experts say presents significant hurdles for the prosecution and will likely be a challenge for the Justice Department to win.
Comey was indicted in North Carolina on Tuesday on charges of making threats against President Trump related to a photograph he posted on social media last year of seashells arranged in the numbers '86 47.' The Justice Department contends those numbers amounted to a threat against Trump, the 47th president. Comey has said he assumed the numbers reflected a political message, not a call to violence, and removed the Instagram post once he saw some people were interpreting it that way.
The indictment is the second against Comey, a longtime target of Trump's ire dating back to his time as FBI director, over the past year. The first one, on unrelated false statement and obstruction charges, was dismissed by a judge last November. Now prosecutors pursuing the threats case face their own challenge of proving that Comey intended to communicate a true threat or at least recklessly discounted the possibility that the statement could be understood as a threat.
The Supreme Court has held that statements are not protected by the 1st Amendment if they meet the legal threshold of a 'true threat.' That requires prosecutors to prove, at a minimum, that a defendant recklessly disregarded the risk that a statement could be perceived as threatening violence. In a 2023 Supreme Court case, the majority held that prosecutors have to show that the 'defendant had some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of his statements.'
The court has also found that hyperbolic political speech is protected. In a 1969 case, the justices held that a Vietnam War protester did not make a knowing and willful threat against the president when he remarked that 'If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J,' referring to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The court noted that laughter in the crowd when the protester made the statement, among other things, showed it wasn't a serious threat of violence.
Regarding the current case, 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.'
Comey deleted the post shortly after it was made, writing: 'I didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence' and 'I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.' Trump said Wednesday he believes his life was 'probably' in danger as a result of the post, telling reporters in the Oval Office, 'If anybody knows anything about crime, they know 86 - it's a mob term for 'kill him.''
Read also:
- American teenagers taking up farming roles previously filled by immigrants, a concept revisited from 1965's labor market shift.
- Weekly affairs in the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag)
- Landslide claims seven lives, injures six individuals while they work to restore a water channel in the northern region of Pakistan
- Escalating conflict in Sudan has prompted the United Nations to announce a critical gender crisis, highlighting the disproportionate impact of the ongoing violence on women and girls.
