Comey’s Numbers Aren’t News…or a Threat
Photograph Source: Mark Warner – CC BY 2.0
“8647.”
Those numbers are spelled out — in seashells — in a May 15 Instagram photo posted by former FBI director James Comey.
The meaning doesn’t seem unclear. To “86” someone, as I recall from my brief late-1980s career in nightclub security, means to remove and ban someone from a bar or club for bad behavior. “47,” of course, refers to Donald Trump, 47th president of the United States.
Cute? I guess. Comey doesn’t like Trump, Trump doesn’t like Comey, and neither of them ever skips an opportunity to tell us so. Big whoop. Any serious editor would classify a story on the seashell photo as “dog bites man.” It’s just not “news” by any traditional definition.
Trump, however, has mastered the art of creating fake “news” as a distraction whenever the real news (for example, billions of dollars in Qatari bribes, failure to make any progress, after more than 100 days, in ending a war he said would be over within 24 hours of his inauguration, a congressional stall on his “big beautiful [spending] bill,” etc.) makes him look bad.
Thus “86” suddenly and magically became code — to Trump and his MAGA cultists, anyway — for “assassination,” and Comey got called in, with full “news cycle” fanfare, to explain himself to the Secret Service.
There are at least three ways, other than the assassination that the number in no way implies, to “86” a sitting president. One is impeachment and conviction. Another is invocation of the 25th Amendment by the vice president and a majority of the cabinet (or other congressionally defined body) to declare him unable to serve. The third is resignation under pressure from a credible threat of one of the first two.
Comey’s “8647” was neither a call to assassinate, nor a threat to assassinate, Trump. Period.
“The Constitution and the rule of law are not partisan political tools,” Comey writes in A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. “Lady Justice wears a blindfold. She is not supposed to peek out to see how her political master wishes her to weigh a matter.”
It’s hard to dredge up much sympathy for Comey. He arrived at that sentiment long after he should have. Long after, for example, his announcement that an FBI investigation into illegal use of a private email server to transmit and store classified information had established the commission of the crimes, but that the perpetrator wouldn’t be prosecuted because, and only because, that perpetrator’s name was “Hillary Clinton.”
No blindfold there. Comey peeked, saw that his political masters didn’t want a Democratic presidential candidate charged with crimes she had provably committed, then “weighed” the matter as ordered.
Comey’s past failure to charge real criminals with real crimes does not, however, mean that he should be accused of a fake one.
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