Former FBI Director James Comey was charged this week over a year-old social media post of a seashell formation that the Justice Department alleges constituted a threat to President Trump’s life.
A grand jury returned an indictment on Tuesday saying that Comey “did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States” when he posted a picture of seashells in the sand on a North Carolina beach in May 2025.
The seashells were arranged — it’s not clear by whom — to form the numbers “8647.” Eighty-six is a slang term widely interpreted as meaning “get rid of,” while Trump is the 47th (and 45th) president.
“I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid, and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary, so let’s go,” Comey said in a Substack video response to the indictment, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years.
Comey has been an outspoken critic of Trump since the president fired him in 2017, four years into his 10-year term, as he was overseeing an investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
But Comey said last year that he interpreted the shell formation as a purely political message, writing, “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.” He quickly took the post down after backlash from Republicans and Trump family members. But that didn’t stop administration officials from opening an investigation.
The Trump Justice Department has aggressively pursued cases against his political enemies. Just months ago, it attempted to indict Comey in a separate case related to his 2020 congressional testimony. Those charges were dismissed in November by a federal judge, who ruled that the prosecutor handling the case was unlawfully appointed.
This new indictment comes just days after a gunman breached a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, allegedly targeting administration officials. Trump has survived two previous assassination attempts, and Justice Department officials stressed this week that it takes all such threats seriously.
At a Tuesday press conference, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche brushed off a reporter’s question about proving Comey’s intent, given the fact that he apologized and took down the post.
“You prove intent with witnesses, with documents, with the defendant himself to the extent … it’s appropriate,” he said. “And that’s how we’ll prove intent in this case.”
A lot of that may hinge on the meaning of four numbers.
From the soda counter to social media
Marjory Collins/Hulton Archive
According to Merriam-Webster, the term “eighty-six” most likely comes from 1930s soda-counter slang meaning an item had sold out (perhaps a rhyming cousin of “nix”).
“A Hollywood soda-jerker forwards this glossary of soda-fountain lingo out there,” reads a May 1993 story in the Camden, N.J., Courier-Post. “‘Shoot one’ and ‘draw one’ is one coke and one coffee … An ‘echo’ is a repeat order. ‘Eighty-six’ means all out of it.”
It took on new meaning as a verb in the 1950s, initially to mean refusing service to a customer and later more broadly “to get rid of, to throw out.”
“Saloonkeepers in bygone days, on observing a patron becoming intoxicated from drinking hard liquor, sometimes switched his drinks to 86-proof liquor,” reads a 1972 Minneapolis Star article. “The practice was described as ‘eighty-sixing’ the patron, and this is probably the source of the verb used today to describe the cutting off of service to a patron by a bartender.”
Merriam-Webster says the service industry meaning of “86” is closest to how it’s most commonly used today, though other interpretations have emerged over the years. One of those is “to kill.”
The dictionary calls that a “logical extension” of the term, but doesn’t include it in its official definition “due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”
“86” has caused a stir in U.S. politics before
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The term seems to have crossed into the political lexicon in 2018, when Sarah Huckabee Sanders — then-press secretary in the first Trump administration — was kicked out of a Virginia restaurant.
The restaurant’s closing staff wrote “86 Sarah Huckabee Sanders” on their note to the morning manager, a photo of which went viral.
Later, in October 2020, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, gave a Zoom interview to Meet the Press with an “8645” pin visible behind her, prompting some Republicans to wonder if she was sending a pointed, or possibly violent, message.
The Detroit News reported at the time that Whitmer’s team said the Trump campaign’s reaction was evidence that no one in the campaign had worked in the restaurant industry.
Anne Curzan, a linguist at the University of Michigan, told Michigan Public at the time that the most accurate meaning of the term was likely the same as in the Huckabee Sanders incident.
“It could mean they’re fired, that there’s no more use for them, they’ve been asked to leave,” she said. “So that meaning is out there as well, which is more relevant to the ‘8645.’”
Blanche was asked on Tuesday whether more such cases are forthcoming, including against Whitmer. He declined to comment on other investigations.
“As far as other incidents of threats against the president of the United States, those will be investigated,” he said, though said it was not appropriate to compare examples. “Every case is different, the facts are different, who makes the threat matters, what the threat says matters.”
Conservatives have used it too
The “8647” slogan has quietly become a code for opposition to Trump, circulating in TikTok posts and on protest signs in the months after he took office.
The online publication Distractify reported in March 2025 that people use it to mean they don’t want Trump to be president.
“The message is vague about how exactly these people want to do that, but it seems that the point is to signal that you don’t want Trump to be in the White House,” it said.
Merchandise stamped with “8647,” from shirts and hats to bumper stickers and pins, are offered by vendors on sites like Amazon and Etsy.
However, the trend didn’t start with Trump. Plenty of “8646” items — a reference to former President Joe Biden — are for sale on online platforms too. NPR reached out to Amazon and Etsy to ask whether those items violate their seller policies prohibiting items that glorify violence.
Some liberal critics on social media have said that Republicans did not seem to take issue when the same slogan — or even more violent rhetoric — was targeted at a Democratic president.
They point to examples of violent rhetoric by the president and his allies, including Trump’s 2024 post on Truth Social featuring a video of a truck driving on the highway with an image of Biden tied up on the back. In 2021, then-Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., was censured after sharing an anime video of himself killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and swinging swords at Biden.
And some have found examples of prominent conservatives using the “86” slogan over the years, digging up far-right influencer Jack Posobiec’s 2022 tweet reading: “86 46.” In 2024, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., used the term to describe Republicans who had been removed from office, which did not cause notable controversy at the time.
Editor’s note: A version of this story originally published in 2025.
