CNN Anchor Flat-Out Asks Comey About 86 Trump Pic: ‘Maybe I Just Shouldn’t Post This?”

CNN anchor John Berman flat-out asked former FBI Director and current political fiction author James Comey whether he ever thought “maybe I just shouldn’t post” a photo that President Donald Trump and others construed as an “assassination threat.”

Comey is in hot water over an Instagram post featuring a photo of seashells spelling out the numbers “86” and “47” and the caption, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

Trump promptly lashed out at Comey, and on Friday night the Secret Service conducted a threat interview with Comey at his house.

On Tuesday night’s edition of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, guest-host Berman pressed Comey about the message, repeatedly asking if he ever did or should have thought better of it, and connecting the incident to Comey’s fiction writing:

BERMAN: All right the Deputy Director of FBI, Dan Bongino, is warning of copycats sending threats to public figures mimicking a now deleted social media post from former FBI Director James Comey. Comey shared this image of seashells spelling out “86 47” which the President and his allies say amounts to a call for his assassination, something the former FBI Director denies.

He was interviewed by the Secret Service on Friday. Now, while there’s some debate about the origins of the phrase, the number 86 more typically refers to running out a restaurant menu item or banning someone from a bar. Donald Trump is the 47th president. For his part, Comey says he came across the shells already arranged, and while he recognized them to be a political message, it had nothing to do with violence, he said.

He is also the author of a new legal thriller, “FDR Drive”, and the former FBI Director James Comey joins me now. We’ll get to your book in a moment, “FDR Drive.” But when you posted this message, “86 47” and I said, there are different interpretations of it, but one interpretation of it is to end someone or something. Was there anything in the back of your mind that said, maybe I just shouldn’t post this?

JAMES COMEY, FORMER FBI DIRECTOR: No, literally nothing, because it seemed entirely innocent and clever to me. I have never and actually still have don’t associate 86 with violence, but because I heard that some folks were, whether they’d do that reasonably or not, I don’t want any part of it. And so, that’s why I took it down from my Instagram account.

BERMAN: You know that you are held to a different standard, that you’re in the spotlight in a way that a lot of people aren’t. Do you think that makes it even more incumbent on you to be careful about things like this?

COMEY: Sure, if you have any inkling that there’s a problem. But they were talking about seashells at the beach that my wife and I stood over trying to understand what it was, and she said, just what you said in the intro, which is she was a longtime server when we were in school. And she said, yes, that used to mean it was a kitchen phrase to say 86, meaning to get it off the menu. And I thought, well, that’s a clever political message. Never occurred to me and actually still doesn’t that its associated with violence.

BERMAN: It still doesn’t, even though people have pointed it out that it has been used in that context. COMEY: Yes, I’ve never seen it used in that context or heard it used in that context — still.

BERMAN: How was your interview with the Secret Service about this?

COMEY: Oh, good, they’re total pros. I’ve worked with Secret Service for many, many years, and they asked the right questions, trying to understand why I did it. We had a very similar conversation to the one you and I just had.

BERMAN: Did you leave thinking that they believed you, or did you leave thinking they still had concerns?

COMEY: I — well, I don’t have any reason to believe they don’t believe me. And so, I feel like they asked the right questions, and I can’t imagine there’ll be any more on it.

BERMAN: Your book is about sort of protected speech when protected speech becomes political violence. Is that a fair way to characterize it? It’s about an extreme podcaster, right, who talks about things. And then there are acts of political violence.

COMEY: Right, it’s about a right-wing extremist trying to motivate followers to violence through his words and his broadcast.

BERMAN: It’s interesting that your book is about that and now there is this discussion about speech, things said, and whether it can be motivating toward violence, Yes?

COMEY: Yes, not interesting to me. A bit of a distraction, actually. But the book is about an important question, and I don’t see the seashell thing as an important issue, but I hope folks will read the book and see that it’s a great thriller, but it’s also about things that are important and current.

Watch above via Anderson Cooper 360.