James Comey Attempts To Shift Blame Onto Trump Admin For ‘Distraction’ Surrounding Alleged Assassination Post

Former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey pointed fingers at President Donald Trump’s administration Monday for their so-called “distraction” surrounding the alleged assassination threat he posted on social media.

FBI director Kash Patel, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other members of the administration have launchedinvestigations into Comey’s now-deleted Instagram post showing a photograph of shells depicting the numbers “8647,” which some have interpreted to be a call for violence against the president. The former FBI director doubled down the image, telling MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that he only regrets the alleged “distraction” created by the Trump administration.

“Did you have any regret about posting the picture?” Wallace asked.

“Well I regret the distraction and the controversy around it. But again, it’s hard to have regret about something that even in hindsight looks to me to be totally innocent for the reasons you said,” Comey said. “But yeah, I didn’t have a gut check. In the Trump-era, I’ve been investigated a lot, audited a lot, and so it’s not my first rodeo. In some strange way, can’t get over, maybe because I’ve lived a happy, productive life since leaving. But this has just been a distraction of that life.”

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Comey said he and his wife found the formation of the shells on the beach, then his wife pointed out that the number “86” is code to remove an item from a menu in the restaurant industry. Believing the formation was “clever,” Comey took a photo of it and posted it online, he said.

“We stood over it and I said ‘you know, I think it’s some sort of political message,’” Comey said. “And she said, ‘you know 86, when I was a server,’ she did a lot of work in restaurants, meant to remove an item from the menu when you ran out of ingredients. And I said, ‘well, to me, as a kid it always meant to leave a place, to ditch a place.’ I said ‘that’s really clever.’ And she said ‘you should take a picture of that.’ So I did, and I posted it on my Instagram account and thought nothing more of it until I heard through her that people were saying it was some sort of call for assassination which is crazy. But I took it down.”