Comey asks to push trial in seashell case to February

Former FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday asked that his trial on charges of threatening President Trump’s life with seashells styled to spell “86 47” be moved to February.

Comey had previously motioned to have the trial start Oct. 21 . His latest motion, written by defense attorney Joseph Zeszotarski Jr., requested that the date be moved “because additional time is needed to prepare for trial,” according to court documents.

Zeszotarski added that this includes time to prepare for any pretrial hearings, review discovery material and to consider and draft “various motions in limine.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) secured a second indictment against Comey in April in connection with a since-deleted Instagram post featuring the seashells in the sands of a North Carolina beach. The indictment claimed that the photo was a “serious expression of an intent to do harm” to Trump.

Comey has denied all wrongdoing, with his defense team previously arguing that “’86’ simply means ‘get rid of’ or ‘eject’ and has no violent connotation except in the most uncommon usages.”

Restaurant employees frequently use the term “86” when an item is unavailable or needs to be removed. The Merriam-Webster dictionary states that “86” originated from 1930s soda-counter slang indicating that an item was sold out.

The former FBI director’s legal team said in his motion to toss the case in July that their client was being targeted for exercising his First Amendment right by “publishing another person’s statement of political opposition.” They also argued that there is no definition of “86,” as seen in a dictionary, meaning “to kill.”

The DOJ discouraged the judge from tossing the case, stating that the photo of the seashells constituted a “true threat” to the president. Prosecutors argued that Comey acknowledged that some may have construed his post as a threat when he deleted it.

Comey wrote that he deleted the post after he “assumed” the shells were arranged in a “political message” and that he did not “realize some folks associate those numbers with violence,” leading him to delete the post, according to a May 2025 Instagram post .

Trump accused Comey of knowing what the message intended, telling Fox News’s Bret Baier in May 2025 that it “meant assassination.”

Comey is a longtime foe of the president and has publicly criticized Trump in the past. The president fired him FBI director in 2017 and the former FBI head later backed former Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid in 2024 and former President Biden’s bid in 2020.