President Donald Trump has dragged former FBI director James Comey into the long-running saga over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, suggesting graffiti at the site was “probably” inspired by his old enemy.
Trump’s Department of Justice has brought felony charges against Comey after he posted a seemingly-innocuous image on Instagram last year of seashells on a beach arranged to spell out the numbers “86 47,” which the president claimed was a coded call for his assassination – to “86,” or kill, the 47th commander-in-chief.
Taking to Truth Social Sunday night, Trump once more went after Comey in the course of lashing out at U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, who enraged him by dismissing indictments against several people accused of sabotaging his $14.7 million renovation of the pool.
The president posted an extract from court documents in the case made against retired Olympic canoeist David Hearn, citing a National Park Service employee who said he saw the athlete “violently” ripping and tugging at the pool’s coating, implying Pirro had been wrong to let the matter drop.
“Numerous other events took place, including using an acid like material on the just installed grass adjoining the Pool,” Trump continued. “On it were written the letters, ‘86 47,’ a phrase probably gotten from James Comey.”
The appearance of the graffiti to which he alluded, which measured roughly 15 by 30 feet, was first reported in late April.
The president did admit that contractor error had played a part in the disastrous makeover of the monument – which saw pieces of its lining float loose and its water turn green with algae when it was refilled in June – as he reported that it would finally reopen soon with new security cameras in place to deter further vandalism.
Trump fired Comey from the FBI early on in his first term in May 2017 and the latter subsequently emerged as a staunch critic of his leadership.
After the Republican returned to power last year, his DOJ indicted Comey when the then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, accused him of lying to Congress.
The ex-official denied the charges before the case was tossed without reaching trial after Halligan was ruled to have overstayed her term in office.
The DOJ then filed a new two-count indictment against Comey in April over the seashell post, insisting it amounted to “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the president of the United States.”
Comey protested his innocence in a Substack video in which he said: “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.”
He has since asked a federal judge to throw out the charges, with his lawyers arguing that the alleged meaning of the code “is contradicted by every possible source of meaning: dictionaries, context, precedent, and common sense.”
They also claim the DOJ sought the opinion of notorious former gangster turned informant Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano to back up its argument that “86” is used in criminal circles to order a hit.
Trump himself has insisted that Comey is a “dirty cop” and said to reporters in the Oval Office: “You ever see the movies? ‘86 him,’ the mobster says to one of his wonderful associates. ‘86 him.’ That means kill him. I think of it as a mob term.”
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