Former FBI head James Comey shed yet more light on his infamous “8647” social media post during an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Tuesday night.
Comey told Colbert that he was walking on the beach with his wife, Patrice, when they noticed the formation in seashells. Comey’s wife asked him, “Did someone put their address in the sand?”
The couple stared for a while before Comey said he realized it was likely a “clever political message.” He credited his wife with recognizing the term “86” to mean get rid of from her time working as a restaurant server.
“She said, ‘You should take a picture of it,’ I said, ‘Sure.’ Then she said, ‘You should Instagram that,’ and then boom!” he added.
Since posting the pic, Comey has drawn swathes of criticism from the MAGA world, including calls for him to be jailed. Comey was appearing on the show to promote his new book, a legal thriller titled FDR Drive.
He also confirmed to Colbert that the Secret Service had since called him in for an interview.
“We stood at it — looked at it, trying to figure out what it was, and she had long been a server in restaurants, and she said, ‘You know what I think it is? I think it’s a reference to restaurants when you would 86 something in a restaurant,” Comey also said.
Colbert appeared to understand the reference and clarified, “Like off the menu?”
Comey continued to explain to Colbert that the reference was something he thought it was a “clever political message,” but said, “No, I remember when I was a kid, you would say ‘86’ to get out of a place. ‘This place stinks, let’s 86 it’”.
The host appeared to understand Comey’s explanation and said he was familiar with the term “86” in food settings.
“I was a bartender, you would 86 a customer if they were getting drunk. Like, ‘Let’s 86 them, give them a low-proof alcohol or something like that,” Colbert said.
According to a journal from the American Dialect Society, “86” is a slang term used to signal that a food or drink item is no longer available or that a customer needs to leave. The dictionary site Merriam-Webster also corroborates this understanding as a term used “to throw out,” or “get rid of”.
However, Trump and MAGA have insinuated that the post was a “threat” to the president’s life.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene slammed Comey’s post, taking to social media to say: “We still don’t know a single thing about Thomas Crooks, who shot the President. So what’s going to happen to James Comey, who just issued a death threat to the President?”
Comey was then asked by Colbert what he thought about Trump’s decision to pardon or commute over 1,500 January 6 rioters.
“It was an obscenity that will stain this country forever,” Comey said.
“It sends terrible messages in that direction [referring to the prospect of future political violence]. It totally undercuts the deterrent effect of prosecutions. It sends a terrible message to people who might investigate crimes like that”.
“You are not going to get ahead in the FBI by working stuff like that, given what you saw happen with the pardons,” he added.
Last week, President Trump responded to Comey’s post by drilling down on the accusations that his message “meant assassination”.
Backpedaling on his post, Comey took to Instagram late Thursday evening to defend his actions after deleting the image.
“I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today 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.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose agency oversees the Secret Service, confirmed that the DHS and the Secret Service were investigating the post as a “threat and will respond appropriately.”
