James Comey is “not afraid” of the Trump administration’s retribution following his highly controversial Instagram post last week, telling MSNBC Monday that the whole experience was not his “first rodeo.”
The former FBI director was caught under heavy fire Thursday after posting a picture of seashells on the beach arranged in the numbers “86” and “47,” which many within President Donald Trump’s orbit understood as a threat to the president.
“86″ is restaurant parlance to get rid of something or ban someone from an establishment, while “47″ was understood to represent Trump’s current term as 47th president of the United States. Federal authorities were swift to investigate Comey, who deleted the post within hours and claimed it was non-violent. However the number “86″ has taken on new meaning in MAGA world in recent months, backed by Merriam-Webster which adds “among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of “to kill.”
“It says something more depressing about the leadership of our current administration,” Comey told MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace of the incident.
“It’s not my first rodeo,” he continued. Comey was notably fired by Trump during his first administration in 2017. “I would hate something like this, or the audit or the investigations, to happen to someone who doesn’t have my experience because I look at it and I think, ‘There’s another one of those.’”
“I’m not afraid,” he added. “I believe in the rule of law in this country. It’s under attack, but it exists, and I’m going to stand up and speak for it. They’re wasting their time if they think they’re going to cow me, especially if they think they’re going to cow my spouse, because that ain’t happening.”
Comey has said that he and his wife, Patrice Failor, were walking on the beach when they spotted the seashell arrangement and believed it to be, as he described it on MSNBC, “some kind of political message.”
“I posted it on my Instagram account and thought nothing more of it until I heard through her that people were saying it was some sort of a call for assassination which is crazy,” Comey said Monday. “I took it down. Even if I think it’s crazy, I don’t want to be associated with violence of any kind.”
The former FBI director was interviewed by the Secret Service at their Washington D.C. field office on Friday.
That same day, Trump told Fox News’ Bret Baier that he didn’t believe Comey’s explanation of the photo and claimed that he knew “exactly” what he was doing.
“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,” the president said. “He apologized because he was hit, he’s a very bad guy.”
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