File photo: On Thursday, June 8, 2017, former FBI Director James Comey testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee in the Hart Senate Building on Capitol Hill.
Cherise May | Null Photo | Getty Images
Former FBI Director James Comey appeared in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on Wednesday, a day after he was charged with threatening to kill President Donald Trump by posting a photo on Instagram of shells arranged to form the message “86 47” on a North Carolina beach last May.
Comey’s first court hearing lasted only about seven minutes. He has not entered a plea in the case, which will be arraigned in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.
“I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid, I still believe in an independent federal judiciary, so let’s go,” Comey said Tuesday after the charges against him were dismissed in North Carolina for the second time in less than a year.
Mr. Comey first appeared in the case in Alexandria. That’s because it’s the closest federal courthouse to his home.
President Trump and the Justice Department argued that the numbers “86 47” represented a threat to assassinate Trump.
According to the dictionary, “86” is a slang term meaning to kick out or exclude someone, and Trump is the 47th president of the United States.
Comey said last May that while on vacation in North Carolina, he found a seashell on the beach and took a photo of it, which he thought was a “political message.”
“I had no idea that some people would associate these numbers with violence,” Comey said after posting the photo, which sparked immediate backlash. “I never thought about it, but I am against violence of any kind, so I resigned from that position.”
Comey posted the photo and deleted it less than a day later.
FBI Director Kash Patel said at a news conference Tuesday announcing Comey’s indictment that the FBI has been investigating the case for the past “nine, 10, 11 months.”
But the three-page indictment against Comey is noticeably scant on details of the evidence the FBI may have unearthed against him, other than the photo of the shell and the assertion that Comey intended to convey the threats Trump had made.
According to the indictment, Comey “knowingly and knowingly transmitted in interstate and foreign commerce communications containing threats to kill President Donald J. Trump, specifically by publicly posting on the internet social media site Instagram a photograph of seashells arranged in an ’86 47′ pattern, which a reasonable recipient familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of intent to harm President Trump.”
Comey is charged with threatening the president and communicating threats in interstate commerce.
Source: @comey | Instagram
The federal judge expected to preside over Wednesday’s hearing was William Fitzpatrick, coincidentally the same judge who presided over Comey’s initial indictment in September by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
In that case, Comey was accused of lying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020 when he denied permission to make other FBI agents anonymous sources in reporting on Hillary Clinton’s investigation and her emails in 2016, when she was the Democratic presidential nominee.
The indictment is seen by critics of President Trump and the current leadership of the Justice Department as retaliation against Comey for his role at the FBI in the investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians in 2016.
The first indictment was dismissed in November after another federal judge ruled that then-interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Harrigan, who obtained the indictment, was not validly appointed by President Trump.
