File photo: FBI Director James Comey testifies during a House Intelligence Committee hearing on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election at the Capitol in Washington, U.S., March 20, 2017.
Joshua Roberts | Reuters
Former FBI Director James Comey on Monday formally asked a federal judge to drop charges of threatening to kill President Donald Trump, saying a photo he posted of a seashell with the number “8647” written on it did not represent a “real threat.”
Comey’s lawyers argued in the motion that the photo he took of seashells on a North Carolina beach was free speech protected by the First Amendment.
And they said the phrase 8647 is a “well-known political slogan expressing opposition to the president.”
“No reasonable observer would understand that the words ’86 47′ imply violence, much less that Mr. Comey would personally threaten violence against the President,” the motion states.
Comey has been a leading critic of Trump’s firing as FBI director in May 2017.
President Trump, the 47th president of the United States, said he interpreted the seashell photo as a death threat.
Comey said he was targeted by the Justice Department because of President Trump’s hostility toward him.
In April, Comey was indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina on charges of using the “8647” photo to threaten the president and communicating threats in interstate commerce.
“This indictment targets protected speech, which is at the heart of the First Amendment,” Comey’s lawyers wrote in the motion to dismiss on Monday.
“Indeed, thousands of items of merchandise featuring this slogan were sold on the Internet and remain available to this day, and the slogan was commonly displayed at protests across the country in the months preceding Mr. Comey’s post,” the motion states.
“Yet the government has now appointed Mr. Comey to prosecute one of the president’s most prominent critics for publishing statements of political opposition to others. Its attempts to suppress core political speech violate both the statute in question and the First Amendment.”
The defense team said the claim that 8647’s post “constitutes a ‘true threat’ to the life of the president” is “contradicted by every conceivable source of meaning, including dictionaries, context, case law, and common sense.”
“’86’ simply means ‘to drive out’ or ‘drive out’ and has no violent connotations except in the most unusual usage,” the lawyers wrote. “Most dictionaries don’t even list the meaning of ‘kill’ as currently proposed by the government. And when combined with ’47,’ which is slang for the 47th president, President Trump, ’86’ is nothing but a rallying cry against President Trump.”
The case marks the second time Comey has been indicted during Trump’s second term in the White House after publicly suggesting the president had committed a crime.
Comey was indicted last September by a federal grand jury in Virginia on charges that he lied during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, 2020, and denied authorizing others at the FBI to serve as anonymous sources for reporting on the investigation and emails of then-2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Comey has denied wrongdoing.
A judge dismissed the first case in November, ruling that President Trump’s former personal attorney Lindsey Harrigan was illegally appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Mr. Harrigan had obtained the indictment against Mr. Comey.
