On Monday, former FBI Director James Comey filed a motion to dismiss his prosecution over a photograph of seashells he shared on Instagram, and buried within the 42-page brief, as noted by legal expert Joyce Vance, was a “little jab” at the Supreme Court.
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Comey was indicted in April on two felony counts for sharing a photograph of seashells on the beach laid out to read “86 47.” The number 47 was interpreted as a reference to Trump as the 47th president of the United States, and 86 as a reference to the informal term used to reject something, or eject someone from a bar or restaurant.
Trump’s Justice Department and MAGA allies have interpreted Comey’s social media post as a threat on the president’s life.
In his brief, Comey and his legal team rejected the DOJ’s interpretation of his social media post, and, in what Vance flagged as a “little jab” at the Supreme Court, used the court’s own terminology to argue the case should be dismissed out of hand.
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Comey’s brief reads: “Allowing this prosecution to proceed would sharply depart from our Nation’s history and tradition,” which Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, flagged as having significance among the Supreme Court’s conservative justices.
“The Court has infamously used the ‘history and tradition’ test in recent terms to reach the result-oriented outcomes it has landed on in culture wars cases like Dobbs, the abortion case, and Bruen, the Second Amendment case,” Vance, who called the case against Comey “ridiculous,” wrote in an analysis published Tuesday on her Substack.
“Here, they flip it back at the government, writing, ‘Under British law, citizens could be prosecuted and executed for speaking about the death of the King. But the Founders emphatically rejected that practice in the Constitution.’ Rather, we are ‘free to criticize government officials in direct and even strident terms.’ That principle is enshrined in the First Amendment.”
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