James Comey Arrested for Seashell Death Threat Against Trump: Prosecutors This Time Steer Clear of Virginia Courts

The surrender of the former director of the FBI, James Comey, at a federal court in Virginia — he was briefly placed under arrest, and then participated in a hearing that lasted around 10 minutes — begins a journey that federal prosecutors hope ends with at least one conviction. Mr. Comey has not yet entered a plea, though on Substack Tuesday he proclaimed his innocence. The indictment that brought Mr. Comey to that Old Dominion courtroom is a daring bid by the Trump Administration to prosecute one of the president’s adversaries on the basis of an arrangement of seashells on sand posted to Instagram. He will be prosecuted in North Carolina. North Carolina’s beaches are popular with wealthy Washington DC-area families who own homes on the exclusive Outer Banks, to the south, on the less outrageously priced Crystal Coast, where Mr. Comey is believed to have a home on Emerald Isle. The year-round residents of Eastern North Carolina — which is dominated by large-scale, industrial-style hog farms — are generally politically conservative. In the courtroom on Wednesday was the interim United States attorney from the Eastern District of North Carolina, Ellis Boyle, who was appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi.The indictment centers on a since-deleted post from Mr. Comey that featured a picture showing the numbers “86” and “47” written in seashells on the beach above the caption “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” In internet slang, “86” can mean “nix” or “get rid.” Mr. Trump is the 47th president. Charges against Mr. Comey for lying to Congress were dropped earlier this year after a judge ruled that the prosecutor in charge was unlawfully appointed. Mr. Comey is now charged with two crimes. In the first the Department of Justice alleges that he “knowingly and willfully made a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States” because a “reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”The DOJ also claims that Mr. Comey committed a second crime when he “consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communication would be viewed as threatening violence, and that he knowingly transmitted a communication in interstate commerce that contained a threat to injure the person of another, which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to a person.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says in a statement that “Threatening the life of the President of the United States is a grave violation of our nation’s laws. The grand jury returned an indictment alleging James Comey did just that.” He adds that the “temperature needs to be turned down, and anyone who dials it up and threatens the life of the President will be held accountable.”In 2023 the Supreme Court held in Counterman v. Colorado that for speech to be bereft of First Amendment protection — and therefore be subject to prosecution — it must amount to a “true threat.” Justice Elena Kagan, writing for a seven justice majority, declared that speech was prosecutable if the speaker “consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence.”Courts and juries, then, are required to inquire not just into the objective nature of the alleged threat but also into whether the speaker had a subjective understanding — however slender — that a threat was being issued. The standard of a “true threat,” though, is easier for prosecutors to reach than the one set for defamation in New York Times v. Sullivan, which requires a plaintiff to show that the defendant made a statement with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”The conservative legal sage Jonathan Turley reckons that Mr. Blanche’s prosecution of Mr. Comey faces “a monumental challenge under the First Amendment. In my view, the image itself is clearly protected speech. Absent some other unknown facts or elements, it would be unlikely to survive a threshold constitutional challenge.” That challenge will likely take the form of a motion to dismiss before the trial even begins.Mr. Comey has explained after he deleted the image that “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.” In order to convict Mr. Comey on either of the charges he faces, prosecutors will be required to show that he acted with intent.Mr. Trump told Fox News last year after Mr. Comey’s post — and subsequent deletion of the seashells that “He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.”The prosecution of Mr. Comey for threatening the president comes days after a third attempt on Mr. Trump’s life appears to have been undertaken by a lone assassin during the White House Correspondents Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton. A lone gunman, Cole Tomas Allen, has been charged with, among other crimes, attempting to assassinate the president.

James Comey Arrested for Seashell Death Threat Against Trump: Prosecutors This Time Steer Clear of Virginia Courts

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