Former FBI Director James Comey now faces criminal charges over a social media post featuring seashells arranged to spell out numbers, in what prosecutors say constitutes a call to harm the sitting president. Comey has denied any such intent, but the case underscores how a single image can trigger competing interpretations that carry serious legal consequences.
The photograph, posted to Instagram last year, showed seashells on a beach forming the numbers 86 and 47. Trump supporters interpreted this as a coded message calling for assassination, with 86 meaning "to kill" and 47 referring to Trump's position as the 47th president. The Department of Justice filed charges on Tuesday.
Comey has stated the meaning never occurred to him when he snapped the picture.
The phrase "to 86" carries multiple meanings depending on context and era. Most commonly, it refers to discarding something, denying service to someone, or ejecting a person from a location. The Merriam-Webster dictionary acknowledges that 86 has occasionally meant "to kill," but the dictionary declined to formally adopt this definition due to its relative rarity and recent emergence.
The term's origins remain murky. The most widely cited story traces it to Chumley's, a speakeasy at 86 Barrow Street in New York's West Village during Prohibition. The bar had two entrances, and 86 allegedly referred to the Barrow Street address of the door through which rowdy patrons would be removed. Another account, documented by author Jef Klein, claims the number referred to the Bedford Street exit where customers would escape when police raided through the Barrow entrance.
Additional origin theories abound. Lunch-counter workers used "86" to signal that a dish had sold out. Columnist Walter Winchell included the term in a 1933 glossary of soda fountain slang. The U.S. Navy deployed the designation AT-6, phonetically "eighty-six," as code for equipment scheduled for disposal or upgrade aboard ships.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the term's documented use to a 1944 biography of actor John Barrymore, describing him as an "eighty-six" at a bar, meaning staff should refuse him service.
Some accounts connect 86 to organized crime operations, where the phrase allegedly meant taking someone "eight miles out of town" and putting them "six feet under." Cassell's Dictionary of Slang lists among its definitions the meaning "to kill, to murder, to execute judicially," theorized to stem from grave dimensions of eight feet long and six feet deep.
The number combination has surfaced in recent political rhetoric. Republicans sold t-shirts reading "8646" to call for impeaching Joe Biden, the 46th president, following the same numeric pattern. Some liberals have accused the right of weaponizing this ambiguity against Comey while feigning ignorance about the term's multiple legitimate meanings.
The charges represent the latest use of federal prosecutorial power against political opponents of the Trump administration, raising questions about how language, intent, and interpretation intersect in criminal law.
Author James Rodriguez: "This case exposes how the same phrase can mean wildly different things depending on who's interpreting it, and how that gap between intent and perception can now land you in court."
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