DOJ Maintains Comey Seashells Post Was Threat to Trump’s Life

The Justice Department is doubling down on its prosecution of James Comey, pushing back on the former FBI director’s assertion that a 2025 social media post wasn’t intended as a threat to President Donald Trump.

The post, a photo of seashells arranged into “86 47,” was “a coded message to” Comey’s “followers meaning ‘kill’ or ‘get rid of,’” the US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of North Carolina wrote in a filing Tuesday in response to Comey’s motion to dismiss the criminal indictment against him.

Comey, one of Trump’s political adversaries and the target of multiple federal prosecution attempts, has said that DOJ failed to allege a “true threat,” noting the claim is “contradicted by every possible source of meaning: dictionaries, context, precedent, and common sense.”

Federal prosecutors challenged that assertion in their Tuesday filing, citing a Wikipedia entry and Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang’s 1970s-era definition of “86' as “to kill, to murder to execute judicially.”

“There is no serious dispute that an objective viewer of Comey’s post could read it to mean ‘Kill President Trump,’” US Attorney Ellis Boyle and Assistant US Attorney Timothy Severo wrote.

The filing is the latest in a back-and-forth dispute over the meaning behind Comey’s social media post and the legitimacy of DOJ’s prosecution, which critics see as one of the latest examples of Trump’s weaponized use of DOJ to target his perceived political foes. The case against Comey in North Carolina follows an earlier failed prosecution attempt in the Eastern District of Virginia.

The North Carolina prosecutors, in attempting to make the case that the “86 47' post constituted a true threat, cited excerpts from Comey’s recent novel, “FDR Drive,” which was five days from publication at the time of his social media post. The book, the prosecutors wrote, centers on a federal prosecutor targeting a far-right media personality who the prosecutor believes “went far beyond the protection of the First Amendment when he singled out his enemies by name and suggested ‘something should be done’ about them.”

Comey’s attorneys wrote in July filings that DOJ had multiple failed attempts to provide evidence showing Comey was aware of a violent definition of “86' at the time he posted the photo. As part if this, the FBI interviewed Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, a prominent former member of the Gambino crime family who became a key government witness in the 1990s case against the organization.

“Mr. Gravano did not recall ever discussing the term ’86' with Mr. Comey, or otherwise ever hearing the term uttered in connection with trial,” Comey’s attorneys wrote in a July filing.

The North Carolina federal prosecutors on Tuesday also responded to Comey’s motion to dismiss based on the argument that he’s the target of vindictive and selective prosecution by Trump’s DOJ.

“Comey cannot show that—in all cases—indicting a self-proclaimed opponent of the President for threatening the life of that President reeks of malice,” the federal prosecutors wrote. “Even if Comey could show vindictiveness, he still fails to demonstrate that such animus was the sole motivation for the initial charging decision.”

DOJ on Tuesday also filed responses to Comey’s motions for disclosure of grand jury transcripts and a hearing to determine if federal agents withheld information from magistrate judges and prosecutors or intentionally misled grand jury members to obtain search warrants and secure the return of the indictment.

“Comey comes nowhere close to making the strong showing of particularized need required to overcome the robust presumption of regularity to which grand jury proceedings are entitled or to justify breaking the secrecy of the grand jury proceedings in this case,” the federal prosecutors wrote.

Comey’s attorneys had argued that federal agents relied on his experience prosecuting organized crime in the Southern District of New York to assert that he must have been aware of a violent meaning associated with “86,” and that this improperly served as the basis of search warrants and the return of the grand jury indictment against him.

Comey is set to go to trial in in October before US District Judge Louise Wood Flanagan. His defense team includes Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a former US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Michael Dreeben, a former deputy solicitor general, and Cooley LLP partners Ephraim McDowell and Rebekah Donaleski.

The case is United States v. Comey, E.D.N.C., No. 4:26-cr-00016, responses in opposition to motions filed 8/18/26.

To contact the reporter on this story: Celine Castronuovo in Washington at ccastronuovo@bloombergindustry.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Adam M. Taylor at ataylor@bloombergindustry.com

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