A combination of file photos show U.S. President Donald Trump in the White House in Washington, DC, U.S. April 9, 2018 and former FBI Director James Comey on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 8, 2017.
Reuters
President Donald Trump said Friday that former FBI Director James Comey was “calling for the assassination of the president” in Comey’s since-deleted social media post that featured the numbers “8647.”
“He knew exactly what that meant,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News, a day after the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service opened an investigation into Comey’s Instagram post.
“A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know … that meant ‘assassination,’ ” the president said.
“Our country’s become respected again, and all this, and he’s calling for the assassination of the president,” said Trump, who narrowly survived an assassin’s bullet last summer.
Comey has denied that his Instagram post showing what he called a “shell formation” of the numbers “8647” was a threat to Trump, who fired him as FBI director in May 2017.
“I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message,” Comey wrote in an Instagram post on Thursday night.
“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence,” Comey wrote. “It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”
Source: @comey | Instagram
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