The most damaging piece of evidence in the federal case against James Comey didn't come from prosecutors. It came from his own lawyers.
Comey's defense team filed a motion to dismiss on July 27, submitting an FBI search warrant affidavit they believed would help their client. What it revealed was a two-minute window that may define the entire case.
The filing shows that Patrice Comey sent her husband a Google screenshot defining "86" exactly two minutes before he posted his now-infamous Instagram photo — seashells arranged on a beach to spell out "86 47." Trump is the 47th president. In criminal slang, "86" means to kill or eliminate someone. Comey captioned the post "Cool shell formation on my beach walk."
A federal grand jury in North Carolina saw it differently. Comey was indicted on two felony counts: threatening the life of the president and transmitting threat communications via interstate commerce. Trial is set for October 21 before U.S. District Judge Louise Wood Flanagan in the Eastern District of North Carolina. The context that made those charges possible: President Trump had already survived three assassination attempts.
Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations reported the text message detail on August 14, noting that the Google screenshot Patrice sent defined "86" using the innocent restaurant meaning — an item removed from the menu, out of stock. That is the definition Comey's team wants the court to focus on. A harmless culinary term. Just a man arranging seashells.
There is a second text the Comey camp has been far less eager to discuss.
After someone warned Patrice that "86 47" could be read as a call to kill the president, she responded: "Now that you said what you said and I googled and saw the right-wing narrative about the numbers, Jim will take down the post."
The timeline: Patrice researched the term before the post went up. Someone flagged the violent meaning after it went up. Patrice's response was "Jim will take down the post."
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley noted that the filing shows Patrice sent her husband a "nonviolent definition" of the term minutes before the post — and raised the obvious question: why establish the nonviolent definition at all unless you already knew a violent one existed?
Comey's team is banking on the dictionary definition they prefer. That strategy requires the court to believe that a man who ran the FBI — who spent his career building federal cases on exactly this kind of evidence, text messages and search histories and the gap between research and action — stumbled into a beach photo that meant nothing.
He knows what a two-minute gap between research and execution looks like on a prosecution's evidence board. He built cases on it.
The DOJ response to the dismissal motion is due any day. The trial is October 21. And the piece of evidence that most clearly establishes Comey understood exactly what he was posting came from the team he hired to save him.
