In my misspent youth, I once worked a summer job as a waiter at Shoney’s. It is an experience that I do not recommend. But it did teach me two valuable things: 1) How not to drown in a puddle of my own embarrassment when marching around the dining room with my fellow servers and singing a birthday song that began, “Happy, happy birthday, we’re so glad you came”; and 2) That when the surly line cooks ran out of chicken fried steak, they would shout “86 the chicken fried steak!” through the pass.
To “86” something, in restaurant slang, is to say that it is out, finished, gone, through, not on the menu anymore. This is the only sense in which I have heard the term used in my entire life.
But according to Wikipedia, which naturally has an entry about the term, two further meanings do exist. “86” can also be applied to people a restaurant refuses to serve, and some slang dictionaries say it can refer to murder.
Which brings us to former FBI director James Comey, Instagram, and a picture of seashells.
86 the shells!
In 2025, Comey posted to Instagram an image of shells arranged in the shape of two numbers: “86 47.”
Trump, our 47th President, has long harbored a grudge against Comey, going back to Comey’s investigation of Trump’s possible Russian ties. Trump famously fired Comey in 2017—then, for good measure, fired his prosecutor daughter in 2025.
Trump has been clear for years about his desire to use the power of the federal government to make life more difficult for Comey, and federal officials in his second term have been willing to comply.
Fortunately, they have also been pretty stupid. Through a series of staggeringly incompetent actions, the administration already had its first Comey indictment tossed out in Virginia—a loss so epic that it got Trump’s interim US attorney for Virginia booted, too.
Today, on completely new and unrelated charges, the Department of Justice has indicted Comey again, this time in North Carolina. The charge is nothing less than a threat to murder the president.
And it’s all based on that single seashell image.
The new indictment says that Comey “did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States, in that he publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ’86 47,’ which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”
You might expect more details in a case this serious and against such a high-ranking former official; there are none.
Get in the clown car
A case this ridiculous, and about such a weighty matter, may be the bulbous red nose that completes the full-on beclownment of the Department of Justice under Trump. (The DOJ is currently run by one of Trump’s personal lawyers.) Popular legal blog Above the Law, for instance, called today’s move a “new low point for DOJ integrity.”
As we have learned just in a single day, the federal government is willing to come after your broadcast licenses if you make a joke that Trump doesn’t like… and your freedom if you make social media posts that Trump doesn’t like. These are apparently the ways in which Trump is fulfilling his promise to halt government “censorship” of US citizens.
Trump himself is, of course, a famously peace-loving—sorry, “peace prize”-loving—man, most recently seen warning Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” in a social media post so unhinged even the pope had to step in and tell him to knock it off.
But apparently, it’s James Comey’s restaurant-slang seashell Instagram image that’s the real crime, the sort of thing stopping America from being truly great again.
