File photo: Former FBI Director James Comey testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee in the Senate Hart Building on Capitol Hill, Thursday, June 8, 2017.
In Cheris | Nurfoto | getty images
Former FBI Director James Comey is expected to appear in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on Wednesday to face a two-time indictment accusing him of threatening to kill President Donald Trump by posting on Instagram a photo of shells arranged to spell out the message “86 47” on a North Carolina beach last May.
“I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid, and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary, so let’s go,” Comey said Tuesday, after the indictment — the second against him in less than a year — was unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, where the case will be prosecuted.
Comey will attend the case’s first hearing in Alexandria because it is the closest federal court to his home.
Trump and the Justice Department have claimed that the number “86 47” represents a threat to assassinate Trump.
According to dictionaries, “86” is slang for ousting or removing someone, and Trump is the 47th president of the United States.
Comey said last May that he had taken the photo of the shells after seeing them on a beach while on vacation in North Carolina and that he assumed it was a “political message.”
“I didn’t realize that some people were linking those numbers to violence,” Comey said after the photo sparked backlash soon after he posted it. “This has never happened to me, but I oppose violence of any kind so I took down the post.”
Comey removed the photo less than a day after posting.
FBI Director Kash Patel announced the charges against Comey at a press conference on Tuesday, saying that the FBI has been investigating the case for the past “nine, 10, 11 months.”
But the three-page indictment against Comey is notably lacking in details of any evidence the FBI discovered against him other than a photo of the shells and a claim that Comey intended to convey the threat Trump allegedly posed to his system.
The indictment states that Comey “knowingly and knowingly transmitted in interstate and foreign commerce a communication containing a threat to kill President Donald J. Trump, specifically, by publicly posting on the Internet social media site Instagram a photograph that depicted sea shells arranged in a pattern forming ’86 47′, which a reasonable recipient familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of intent to harm President Trump.”
Comey is accused of threatening the President and transmitting threats in interstate commerce.
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The federal magistrate handling Wednesday’s hearing is Judge William Fitzpatrick, who, coincidentally, is the same magistrate who handled Comey’s first indictment by the DOJ in the Eastern District of Virginia in September.
Comey was accused of lying in that case Senate Judiciary Committee In 2020 he refused to authorize anyone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton and her emails when she was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016.
That indictment was seen by critics of Trump and the current leadership of the DOJ as retaliation against Comey for his role in the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign and his contacts with Russians.
The first indictment was dismissed in November when another federal judge found that then-interim U.S. Attorney Lindsay Halligan, who received the indictment, was not validly appointed by Trump.