James Comey Asks Federal Judge to Dismiss Trump "Seashells" Threat Case

Former FBI Director James Comey formally asked a federal judge on Monday to dismiss his indictment on a charge of threatening to kill President Donald Trump, arguing that the Instagram photo at the center of the case does not constitute a "true threat" under the law.

The motion, filed July 27, centers on a photo Comey posted of seashells arranged to spell out the number "8647" on a North Carolina beach. Prosecutors charged him in April before a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina with threatening the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce.

Comey's attorneys argue the numerical phrase is a "well-known political slogan that expresses opposition to the president" — not a call to violence.

"No reasonable observer would understand the phrase '86 47' to connote violence at all — let alone to threaten that Mr. Comey personally would commit violence against the President," the motion states.

Trump is the 47th president of the United States and has said he interpreted the seashells photo as a threat against his life.

Comey's lawyers pushed back on that interpretation, writing that "'86' simply means 'get rid of' or 'eject' and has no violent connotation except in the most uncommon usages." The motion further noted that most dictionaries do not list "to kill" as a definition of the term, and that when combined with "47" — shorthand for the current president — it functions as political opposition rather than a threat.

The defense also contended that the indictment targets constitutionally protected speech, noting that "thousands of items featuring this slogan 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."

"But 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," the motion reads. "That attempt to suppress core political speech contravenes both the statutes at issue and the First Amendment."

Comey, a leading critic of Trump who was fired as FBI director in May 2017, has maintained that he is being targeted by the Department of Justice because of Trump's personal hostility toward him.

Monday's filing is not the first time Comey has faced federal charges during Trump's second term. A federal grand jury in Virginia indicted him last September on charges that he lied during Senate Judiciary Committee testimony on September 30, 2020, when he allegedly denied authorizing an FBI employee to serve as an anonymous source for news reports about a probe of Hillary Clinton's emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. Comey denied any wrongdoing in that matter.

A judge dismissed that Virginia case in November after ruling that Lindsey Halligan — a former personal attorney for Trump who had obtained the indictment — was unlawfully appointed as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The outcome of the current motion to dismiss will hinge on whether the court finds that the "8647" post meets the legal threshold for a "true threat," a standard that requires showing a speaker communicated a serious intent to commit violence. The case is being watched closely as a test of how far First Amendment protections extend to politically charged symbolic speech directed at a sitting president.