Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey alleged in a Monday court filing aiming to dismiss an indictment against him that the incident violates free speech.
“This indictment targets protected speech at the heart of the First Amendment,” said the filing. “Mr. Comey, an outspoken critic of President Trump, posted a photograph of seashells spelling out ‘86 47,’ a well-known political slogan that expresses opposition to the President.”
While the post did signal Comey’s opposition to Trump, the filing said it did not indicate any violent intent towards the president. Audacy reported on the now-deleted post back in May 2025, when it caused a stir among Republicans.
Comey said this in a follow-up post: “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.”
In September of that year, an indictment alleges that Comey obstructed a congressional investigation into the disclosure of sensitive information, but that’s not the one referenced in Monday’s filing. Comey has denied any wrongdoing in that case. After the September 2025 indictment, Comey’s son-in-law Troy A. Edwards, Jr., a senior national security prosecutor, resigned as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in the Department of Justice.
Another indictment – the one Comey responded to this week – came this April. It alleged that Comey “knowingly and willfully made a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States,” and “consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communication would be viewed as threatening violence, and that he knowingly transmitted a communication in interstate commerce that contained a threat to injure the person of another, which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to a person.”
Comey’s Monday filing argues that “thousands of items featuring this slogan [86 47] have been sold on the internet and are available to this day, and the slogan was commonly displayed at protests around the country in the months preceding Mr. Comey’s post.” Furthermore, it alleges that “the government now singles out Mr. Comey to prosecute one of the President’s most prominent critics for publishing another person’s statement of political opposition,” and characterizes this approach as an “attempt to suppress core political speech.”
The Hill noted that the filing was in the Eastern District of North Carolina, where Comey took a photo of the “86 47” message last year.
