FILE PHOTO: FBI Director James Comey testifies before the House Intelligence Committee hearing into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 20, 2017.
Joshua Roberts | Reuters
Former FBI Director James Comey on Monday formally asked a federal judge to dismiss his indictment on a charge of threatening to kill President Donald Trump, saying the photo he posted of seashells spelling out the number “8647” did not represent a “true threat.”
Comey’s lawyers, in their motion, said the photo he took of the seashells on a North Carolina beach is free speech protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.
And they said the numerical phrase 8647 is a “well-known political slogan that expresses opposition to the president.”
“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 says.
Comey is a leading critic of Trump, who fired him as FBI director in May 2017.
Trump is the 47th president of the United States, and has said he interpreted the seashells photo as a threat to kill him.
Comey has said he is being targeted by the Department of Justice because of Trump’s animus toward him.
Comey was indicted in April by a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina on charges of threatening the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce with the “8647” photo.
In this motion to dismiss on Monday, Comey’s lawyers said, “This indictment targets protected speech at the heart of the First Amendment.
“In fact, 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,” the motion said.
“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. That attempt to suppress core political speech contravenes both the statutes at issue and the First Amendment.”
The defense lawyers wrote that the allegation that the “8647” post “constitutes a ‘true threat’ on the President’s life” is “contradicted by every possible source of meaning: dictionaries, context, precedent, and common sense.”
“’86’ simply means ‘get rid of’ or ‘eject and has no violent connotation except in the most uncommon usages,” the lawyers wrote. “Most dictionaries do not even list the meaning — ‘to kill’ —that the government now proposes. And when combined with ’47’ —slang for President Trump, the forty-seventh President— ’86’ becomes nothing more than a call to oppose President Trump.”
The case is the second time Comey has been indicted during Trump’s second term in the White House after the president publicly suggested he had committed a crime.
Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury in Virginia last September on charges related to him allegedly lying during testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, 2020, when he denied authorizing someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source for news reports about a probe of Hillary Clinton and her emails when she was the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.
Comey denied any wrongdoing.
A judge dismissed that first case in November after ruling that Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer for Trump, was unlawfully appointed as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan had obtained the indictment against Comey.
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