The former director of the FBI James Comey was accused of threatening the life of the US President and transmitting a threat across state borders. The charges were filed in federal court for the Eastern District of North Carolina on Tuesday and are punishable by a maximum sentence of ten years in prison each.
At issue is a post that Comey made on Instagram last May, while on vacation in North Carolina, showing an arrangement of shells on a beach with the numbers 86 and 47. In North American slang, the number 86 can be used as a verb, meaning to expel someone from somewhere, while 47 can be seen as a code for Trump, the 47th President of the USA.
This image, according to the process, “would be interpreted” as “a serious expression of the intention to harm the President of the United States.”
Comey deleted the message after it raised controversy. “I didn’t realize that some people associated these numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I am opposed to any type of violence, so I removed the publication”, explained the former director shortly after publishing it.
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But Trump insisted the image was a death threat. “He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant. You’re the director of the FBI and you don’t know what that meant? It meant murder, clearly,” Trump told Fox News in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, at the end of a state visit to the Middle East.
Now, the accusation gains formality, at the same time as it marks a new push by Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) to criminally pursue the head of state’s alleged political enemies. Last year, Trump referred to Comey by name in a social media post, calling for criminal charges against his opponents.
“I think it’s fair to say that threatening the life of any person is dangerous and could constitute a crime. Threatening the life of the President of the United States will never be tolerated by the Department of Justice,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press conference on Tuesday. Blanche declined to comment on how the DOJ will prove that Comey intended to harm Trump and said doing so would be “premature.”
The former FBI director declared himself innocent of the charges and assured “not to be afraid”. “I remain innocent, I remain fearless, and I continue to believe in an independent federal justice system,” Comey said in a video released on Tuesday. “It’s so important that we all remember: this is not who we are as a country, this is not what the Department of Justice should be, and the good news is that we are getting closer and closer to restoring those values. Keep the faith.”
The top Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin, lamented, in a statement, a new attack on James Comey by a “Department of Justice instrumentalized in the name of a vengeful President.”
Comey was Abruptly fired by Donald Trump in 2017, while the FBI was investigating possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. He had already been accused of having lied under oath when he denied, in response to a question from a senator, having authorized a deputy to be quoted without being identified in the media about sensitive investigations conducted by the FBI, a case that ended up being archived.
The DOJ has also launched an investigation involving John Brennan, former director of the CIA, and another involving a former advisor to Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease specialist who was main face of the fight against the covid-19 pandemic in the United States. David Morens, a former employee of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was formally charged this Tuesday with evading requests for access to federal records related to investigations into alternative theories about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the use of his e-mail personnel for government affairs.
