Former FBI Director James Comey on Monday addressed critics of his recent “86 47” social media post, calling it “crazy” to believe that the message was intended to serve as a call for President Donald Trump’s “assassination.”
“But I took it down. Even if I think it’s crazy, I don’t want to be associated with violence of any kind,” Comey told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace in his first on-camera interview on the Instagram post that Trump claimed to be a call to violence.
Comey, who met with the Secret Service on Friday as the agency and the Department of Homeland Security investigate, weighed in on MAGA outrage over the post he shared last week showing beach shells forming the number “8647.”
While the term “86” is commonly known to refer to ejecting or removing someone (or something) from somewhere (or a menu item that’s no longer available at a restaurant), some have interpreted the term as meaning “to kill.”
Comey, who Trump fired in 2017 after the FBI investigated the president’s 2016 campaign ties to Russia, reflected on how he and his wife discovered the shell formation during a walk on the beach.
“We stood over it and I said, ‘You know, I think it’s some kind of political message,’ and she said, ‘You know, 86, when I was a server — she did a lot of working in restaurants — meant to remove an item from the menu when you ran out of ingredients,’” he explained to Wallace.
“And I said, ‘Well, to me, as a kid, it always meant to leave a place, to ditch a place.’ I said, ‘That’s really clever.’ So then she said, ‘You should take a picture of that.’”
Comey told Wallace that he “thought nothing more” of the photo after sharing it until his wife told him that people saw it as a call for Trump’s assassination.
He said he was then contacted that night by the Secret Service, describing the officers as “pros.”
Comey, when asked if he regretted sharing the photo, said he regrets the “distraction” and “controversy” surrounding the post.
“I didn’t have a gut check. I, in the Trump era, I’ve been investigated a lot, audited a lot, and so it’s not my first rodeo,” he said.
“I’m, in some strange way, the relationship he can’t get over. Maybe because I’ve lived a happy, productive life since leaving [the FBI], but this has just been a distraction in that life.”
