Attorneys for former FBI Director James Comey are asking a federal court to toss out the indictment accusing him of threatening President Donald Trump’s life, arguing his Instagram post of seashells spelling “86 47” was nothing more than protected political speech.
Comey was indicted in April over the post, published in May 2025 and later deleted, which prosecutors say amounted to a threat against the president. In a filing Monday, Comey’s legal team called the case an assault on the First Amendment, insisting the numbers referenced a slogan that has circulated at protests and on merchandise nationwide, rather than any call for violence.
“Mr. Comey, an outspoken critic of President Trump, posted a photograph of seashells spelling out ’86 47,’ a well-known political slogan that expresses opposition to the President,” the filing said, adding that thousands of items bearing the phrase have been sold online and that it was a common sight at demonstrations in the months before his post.
The defense accused the Justice Department of singling out Comey “to prosecute one of the President’s most prominent critics for publishing another person’s statement of political opposition,” calling the effort an unconstitutional attempt to suppress speech.
Prosecutors, however, have pointed to the phrase’s widely understood meaning as coded language for killing the president, a reading that helped drive the grand jury’s decision to indict one of Trump’s most vocal law enforcement critics.
Comey has denied any intent to threaten Trump and is expected to plead not guilty at an arraignment scheduled for next month in North Carolina.
His attorneys argue that even a trial ending in acquittal would amount to unconstitutional punishment and could invite future prosecutions of the president’s perceived political opponents, noting that officials have warned they would pursue anyone who tries to “copycat” Comey’s post.
The filing also disclosed that after deleting the image, Comey reached out to his local police chief to flag the controversy and later agreed to sit for an interview with Secret Service agents, details his lawyers say undercut any claim that he intended a genuine threat. They argue prosecutors have not met the Supreme Court’s demanding standard for proving a “true threat,” which requires evidence Comey himself meant to incite violence.
Comey’s team also sought to draw a contrast with Trump’s own rhetoric, pointing to the president’s earlier description of lawmakers who urged troops to disobey unlawful orders as committing “treason” that was “punishable by death.” The comparison drew immediate skepticism from Trump allies, who note the president was addressing lawmakers accused of encouraging service members to defy the commander in chief, a markedly different scenario than a former top law enforcement official publicly signaling hostility toward a sitting president he has spent years attacking.
The case marks the latest chapter in the long-running feud between Trump and Comey, whom the president fired as FBI director in 2017 and has repeatedly accused of politicizing the bureau’s Russia investigation into his 2016 campaign.
Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 17:00Joe Biden kept classified material after leaving the vice presidency, knew what it was, and read it aloud to a civilian with no security clearance who was helping him write a book he was paid $8 million for. He said as much on tape, repeatedly, in 2016 and 2017. The Justice Department had those recordings and kept them from the public for two years - the same two years it was prosecuting Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents.
Former President Joe Biden speaks during the National Bar Association's 100th Annual Awards Gala in Chicago on July 31, 2025. Nam Y. Huh/AP PhotoThe recordings came out Monday night, released by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project after a FOIA fight that began in March 2024 and ran first against the Justice Department and then against Biden's personal attorneys. Roughly three hours of audio and 117 pages of transcripts, drawn from the interviews Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained during his investigation into Biden's handling of classified material. The Oversight Project says the complete set runs to about 70 hours and that further releases are coming.
Start with what is on them.
In an October 2016 session, recorded while he was still the sitting vice president, Biden tells ghostwriter Mark Lewis Zwonitzer: "I have extensive notes over this period of time... They didn't even know I had this."
In February 2017, a month after leaving office and living in a Virginia rental: "So this was - I, early on, in '09 - I just found all of the classified stuff downstairs." He then walks Zwonitzer through his 2009 argument against the Afghanistan troop surge.
Joe Biden: "So this was, I early on, um, in '09 I just found all the classified stuff downstairs." pic.twitter.com/lsFlaSZMhC
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) July 27, 2026On April 14, 2017, he stops to warn the man he's talking to: "Some of this may be classified. So, be careful. I'm not sure. ... It's not marked classified, but -"
Joe Biden: "Some of this may be classified so be careful with it." pic.twitter.com/V6wUOH0z8S
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) July 27, 2026Elsewhere in the same period: "The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified."
Hur's report found that Biden read from classified notebooks to Zwonitzer "nearly verbatim, sometimes for an hour or more at a time" on at least three occasions, and that the evidence showed convincingly he knew those notebooks held classified information. The FBI later recovered marked classified documents on Afghanistan policy, along with the notebooks, from the garages, offices and basement den of Biden's Wilmington home.
The transcripts are shot through with redactions. The Oversight Project's argument is that the blackouts are themselves the evidence: "The silence of the redactions loudly demonstrates that Biden knowingly and willfully disclosed classified information to his ghostwriter." Nine years on, the public still isn't cleared to know what he told a man who wasn't cleared to hear it.
The Justice Department Had The Tapes The Whole TimeIn June 2023, the Department of Justice indicted Donald Trump on dozens of counts for retaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Espionage Act charges, a special counsel, a grand jury, federal agents inside a former president's home, and a year of argument over whether a man who kept boxes in a bathroom endangered the country.
Through every month of that, the same Department held audio of the sitting president saying he'd found all the classified stuff downstairs. It had obtained the recordings through Hur's investigation, knew their contents in detail, and declined to release them for the remainder of Biden's term.
When Biden's own interview with Hur finally surfaced in May 2025, the Department didn't relent - Axios obtained the five hours of audio and published it.
The ghostwriter tapes took another fourteen months. Once Biden left office and no longer had a department asserting exemptions on his behalf, his private attorneys sued in May 2026 to keep them sealed, arguing the conversations were personal. A federal judge in Washington ruled against him in June. A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit then rejected his appeal 2-1, finding a substantial public interest in disclosure.
He had two moves left - rehearing before the full circuit, or a petition to the Supreme Court - and took neither. His spokesman announced that Biden "respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy," in the same week he stopped resisting one.
The Ghostwriter Deleted The Recordings Before The FBI CalledThe tapes came close to never existing at all. Chapter Seventeen of Hur's report deals with what Zwonitzer did after learning a special counsel had been appointed to investigate Biden. Before the FBI made contact, he deleted the audio files of his Biden interviews from his laptop and from an external hard drive. He described it to investigators plainly: "I simply took the audio files subfolder from both the G drive and my laptop and slid them into the trash. I saved all the transcripts."
Hur's own assessment of what had been destroyed was that the recordings "had significant evidentiary value."
Bureau technicians recovered most of the audio from the external drive, and nothing relevant from the laptop. Three of the recovered files were missing portions. A fourth had been partly overwritten by a different recording. Zwonitzer told investigators he'd been worried about being hacked, and declined to say how much of his motivation was the federal investigation he had just learned about. He wasn't charged - as Hur cited insufficient evidence and found him cooperative and forthright, which he was, after the deletion.
Hur Gave Two Different Answers Five Weeks ApartIn addition to pulling a Comey ('no reasonable prosecutor' vibes), Hur was quite the spin doctor.
In February 2024, Hur wrote that a jury would likely see Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," and that convicting a former president in his eighties of a felony requiring willfulness would be difficult. It was the only line most people retained from a 345-page report. Biden's own lawyers spent the following week attacking it as gratuitous, and it followed him into every press conference until he left the 2024 race.
Five weeks later, on March 12, 2024, Hur sat before the House Judiciary Committee under oath and was asked why Biden had taken the notebooks in the first place. His answer pointed at money. Biden had "strong motivations to ignore proper procedures for safeguarding his classified" material, Hur testified, and the likely reason he wanted the notebooks was the $8 million three-book deal he'd signed with Flatiron Books in April 2017, reported by Publishers Weekly and covering two books by Biden and one by Jill Biden.
Those two accounts describe different men. One is confused and harmless. The other is a former vice president with a financial motivation to hold onto national security material and a ghostwriter waiting to hear it.
The financial record sits in public filings. The Bidens reported adjusted gross income of $396,456 in 2016, his last full year as vice president, and $11,031,309 in 2017. Promise Me, Dad sold more than 300,000 copies, and Biden took in roughly $1.8 million from thirty book-tour appearances. When Hur's investigators later asked him about the recordings, his written answers maintained that he'd used the word "classified" only loosely around his ghostwriter.
Bottom line: Hur found evidence of disclosure - spoken aloud, to a civilian without clearance, in service of a book contract that Hur himself identified as the motive. Disclosure is what the Espionage Act was written to reach, and the man who did it was never charged, never tried, and never had to sit in a courtroom while a jury listened to the recording.
In February 2025, Trump revoked Biden's security clearances and daily intelligence briefings, citing the special counsel directly: "The Hur Report revealed that Biden suffers from 'poor memory' and, even in his 'prime,' could not be trusted with sensitive information."
Meanwhile, about 67 hours of audio have yet to be released.
Listen to more below:
Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 16:40