James Comey’s lawyers asked a court late Tuesday to throw out the criminal case accusing him of threatening President Donald Trump on social media, saying the prosecution was built on misleading statements, false filings and key omissions by federal officials. The defense also said the case should be dismissed because it was vindictive and selective.
The filing lands now because it is the first direct challenge to the case since Comey was charged in April over an Instagram post he made a year earlier. In that post, he showed seashells arranged as 86 47 after saying he found them on a beach in North Carolina. The Justice Department says the image amounted to a threat against Trump, the 47th president. Comey deleted the post soon after putting it up, and he has said he did not know anyone would read the numbers as a call to violence.
That dispute sits at the center of the case. Defense lawyers say 86 has long meant to get rid of or eject, and they say the phrase appears on thousands of items sold online and is often displayed at protests. They also point to the investigation itself, saying searches of an internal FBI database turned up inconclusive results when investigators looked for any link between Comey and the term 86. An FBI agent reviewing a file in the case against reputed mobster John Gambino found no references to the term, and Salvatore Gravano said he did not recall discussing 86 with Comey or hearing it tied to the trial.
The sharper attack, though, is on how the case was built. The lawyers wrote that discovery supports at least a substantial preliminary showing that affidavits for two search warrants contained intentionally false statements and material omissions, enough to wipe out any plausible showing of probable cause. They also asked for transcripts of grand jury proceedings, a move that signals they believe the indictment may have been secured through irregularities they want the court to examine.
The Justice Department is standing by its reading of the post as a threat. Comey’s defense says the case is really about retaliation, not public safety, and argues that officials misled judges while pursuing a former FBI director who has long been one of Trump’s most vocal critics. The next test is whether the court lets the defense see the grand jury record and whether the judge is persuaded that the warrant process was so compromised that the case cannot stand.
