Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to keep a criminal case alive over a social media post by James Comey that displayed seashells arranged to spell "86 47." The number 47 refers to Donald Trump's position in the presidential sequence. The shorthand "86," drawn from American vernacular, means to eliminate or kill someone.
The Department of Justice cited Comey's own published novel in its court filing. Prosecutors used the book to argue that Comey understood what the phrase meant when he made the post. The government is opposing a move that would end the case before trial.
What prosecutors put in writing
The DOJ's core argument is about how an outside observer would read the image. "There is no serious dispute that an objective viewer of Comey's post could read it to mean 'Kill President Trump,'" prosecutors wrote.
That framing is deliberate. Prosecutors are not claiming to know what Comey was thinking. They are arguing about what a reasonable person seeing the post would conclude.
The novel citation matters for a specific reason. When a defendant argues that alarming language was irony, metaphor, or accidental, prosecutors try to show the person understood the words they used. A published book authored by Comey is harder to walk back than a social media post. Prosecutors are using it as evidence of awareness.
What was filed versus what is only claimed differs here. What exists in the record is the image, the government's reading of it, and the DOJ's reference to Comey's own writing. Whether the case survives a motion to dismiss turns on whether the judge agrees that a reasonable person could read the post as a threat against the president.
Comey has not been convicted of anything. The DOJ is at a pretrial stage: arguing that the case deserves to continue, not that guilt has been proved.
The "86 47" arrangement drew attention because the construction is unusually direct. The ordinal maps to a specific president, the slang maps to a specific act, and the medium, seashells, did nothing to obscure either meaning.