Comey's wife texted him the definition of "86" just two minutes before he posted the seashell photo.
That's the detail now emerging from court filings in the Eastern District of North Carolina case against the former FBI director, as reported from the growing court record. Patrice Comey sent her husband a screenshot showing that "86" means to eliminate or get rid of something. He went ahead and posted an Instagram photo of seashells arranged to read "86 47" anyway.
Then it got worse for Team Comey at home. A family member fired off a furious text to Patrice calling the post "a call for violence" and adding that they'd been biting their tongue for a long time but couldn't stay silent anymore. The relative said they hoped Comey ends up in jail for his crimes.
So even his own family saw it and thought he'd crossed a line.
The text from Patrice, which prosecutors will likely use to show he acted with full knowledge, only surfaced because Comey wouldn't hand over the original photo with its metadata. Investigators had to get a warrant through Apple to obtain the file. The former head of the FBI, a man who built an entire career on the premise that cooperating with investigators is what innocent people do, made his own former agency go around him to retrieve evidence in his case.
That detail alone is worth sitting with for a moment.
This is the same James Comey who helped pioneer the approach of prosecuting peripheral conduct, things like process crimes and misleading statements, to squeeze bigger targets during the Russia investigation. Robert Mueller adopted that exact strategy to pursue Manafort, Flynn, Stone, Papadopoulos, and Cohen. None of those prosecutions involved proven Russian collusion. They involved conduct that became criminal largely because investigators were digging aggressively enough to find it.
Now Comey finds himself on the receiving end of that identical approach. Federal investigators are combing through his phone records, his metadata, and his communications. The broader conspiracy investigation reportedly touches on the Steele Dossier, briefings to Republican senators that allegedly aimed to undermine the Ukraine corruption probe, and what a CIA whistleblower described as a parallel operation running outside the White House.
If Comey decides a plea deal sounds better than a potential stay at the federal correctional facility in Butner, North Carolina, he could become the single most important witness in that entire investigation. Which is precisely how Mueller used Trump's associates against him, just pointed in the opposite direction.
The man who perfected the art of using the legal system as a pressure tool is now feeling exactly that pressure himself. The playbook hasn't changed. The name on the file folder has.
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