RT-Engels: 16-05-2025,
James Comey knew exactly what his recent cryptic social media post meant, the US president asserts
US President Donald Trump has accused former FBI director James Comey of posting a since-deleted social media post calling for his “assassination.”
Comey posted a photograph of seashells spelling out the numbers ‘86 47’ in a now-deleted Instagram post on Thursday. He captioned the cryptic post with “cool shell formation on my beach walk.”
White House officials and Republicans quickly interpreted the post as a coded threat to the 47th US president, arguing the number 86 was used in its slang form to mean, ‘get rid of’ or ‘kill’.
Comey subsequently deleted the image and explained in a separate post: “I posted a picture earlier of some shells I saw on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message. I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”
Trump isn’t convinced.
“He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant,” he told Fox News in an interview on Friday.
That meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.
“If you’re the FBI director… and you don’t know what that meant? Now, he wasn’t very competent, but he was competent enough to know what that meant,” the president added.