James Comey Secures Delay in His Trial for Threatening Trump With Seashells — and Buys Time To Try To Get Case Dismissed

The delay to October from July of the criminal trial against the former director of the FBI, James Comey, is a victory for the man emerging as one of President Trump’s primary adversaries — even if the government did not contest the scheduling switch.Mr. Comey is charged with threatening to kill Mr. Trump by posting a photo on Instagram of seashells on a beach arranged in the numbers “86 47.” The government contends that “86” is slang for “nix” or “get rid” of something, and “47” refers to Mr. Trump. Comey captioned the post “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” Mr. Comey subsequently deleted the post and claimed he was ignorant of the meaning conveyed by the numbers. Acting Attorney Todd Blanche argues that “you are not allowed to threaten the President of the United States of America. That’s not my decision. That’s Congress’s decision, and a statute that they passed that we charge multiple times a year.”The indictment was unsealed just days after the third attempt on Mr. Trump’s life, this one at the White House Correspondents Dinner held at the Washington Hilton. The government insists that Mr. Comey’s post amounted to “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.” Mr. Comey secured this delay by telling Judge Louise Flanagan that his defense “may require extensive briefing.”While the Department of Justice did not oppose Mr. Comey’s request for a delay, the longer runway gives the former federal prosecutor more time to file what is expected to be a bevy of motions to dismiss. Chief among them is likely to be the argument that Mr. Comey is the target of a “selective and vindictive” prosecution. While the bar for succeeding at such a claim is high, if a defendant succeeds the remedy is automatic dismissal.Mr. Comey has previously argued that he is being selectively prosecuted. That was during his first indictment at the hands of Mr. Trump’s DOJ. In September he was charged with two counts of lying to Congress in testimony he delivered in 2020 about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He immediately sought to have that indictment tossed as selective and vindictive.The presiding judge, Cameron McGown Currie, never reached that question because she ruled that the prosecutor in charge, Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed by the then-attorney general, Pam Bondi. The disqualification motion was decided before the motions to dismiss on the grounds of selectivity and vindictiveness, meaning those arguments are frozen. They could, though, be reanimated if the DOJ wins its appeal of Ms. Halligan’s disqualification. After Mr. Comey’s indictment was unsealed, he posted a video in which he declared “Well, they’re back. This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina Beach a year ago. And this won’t be the end of it, but nothing has changed with me. I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid, and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary, so let’s go.”An earlier filing by Mr. Comey indicated that he plans to challenge this latest indictment “on multiple constitutional grounds.” He is also likely to move to dismiss the indictment as a facial violation of the First Amendment’s protection of speech. The Supreme Court has held that for speech to be prosecuted as incitement to violence, it must amount to a “true threat,” meaning that it was understood to be threatening by both the speaker and the intended audience.

James Comey Secures Delay in His Trial for Threatening Trump With Seashells — and Buys Time To Try To Get Case Dismissed

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