Seven Words

James Comey, former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a man who once ran the most powerful law enforcement agency on earth, was walking on a North Carolina beach when he came across a pattern of shells arranged, by persons unknown, into the numbers 86 47. He found them cool. He photographed them, posted the picture to Instagram, and wrote that down. The forty-seventh president's administration reviewed the post and concluded he was calling for an assassination. Two federal charges followed, each carrying a maximum of ten years. The post was deleted. The charges were not.

Eighty-six, for those who have never worked a diner shift, means remove from the menu. It has meant this for decades, in kitchens across America, without previously troubling the Justice Department.

One reaches, instinctively, for Dickens.

The Circumlocution Office, staffed, as readers will recall, by the Barnacle family across generations of cheerful, unexamined tenure, was not designed to resolve things. It was designed to continue. 'How Not to Do It' was never a criticism levelled at the Office. It was the quiet genius of the place, the thing that kept the right people comfortable and the wrong people shuffling between floors with their increasingly dog-eared files, waiting for someone to tell them which window to go to next. The system did not fail Arthur Clennam. It worked precisely as intended, on him, and on everyone like him. This is the distinction the Circumlocution Office always understood and its critics never quite did.

The Justice Department opened its investigation in May 2025. For the best part of a year the matter was, one presumes, being considered. Comey went about his life. Other walks – possibly. Other beaches – probably. In April 2026 the charges arrived, filed, with a geographical attentiveness that Dickens would have appreciated, in the Eastern District of North Carolina, the same district in which the shells were found, the jurisdiction of the beach. One imagines the filing clerk entering this detail with the same careful, conscientious pride with which the Barnacle family entered everything: correctly, thoroughly, and in complete innocence of why it might be funny.

Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, America's chief spymaster, a person with access to the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus in human history, announced that Comey had issued a hit on the 47th president. The FBI, the institution Comey once led, before his removal became, as these things do, a matter of considerable public interest, is among the agencies now involved in the case. There is a novelistic quality to that particular irony which one tries not to enjoy too much and fails.

The Barnacle family, one feels, would have been perfectly at home with all of it. The paperwork is correct. The jurisdiction is established. The charges are real and carry real weight, twice times ten is twenty years in total for a caption about a shell formation, and have been arrived at through a process so measured, so procedurally thorough, so entirely committed to its own internal logic, that the question of whether any of it bears any relationship to an actual threat against an actual person is simply not the kind of question this particular system is designed to ask. The process is the point. The process is always the point.

It is worth noting, in passing, that the shells in question appear to have been bay scallops, mussels, and what the North Carolina shoreline most plausibly offers up as cockles or small clams. Not a barnacle among them. Even Dickens might have paused at that. Then he would have written it in anyway, because some things are simply too perfect to leave out, and the truth, in this instance, is not going to get in the way.

Comey says the violent interpretation never crossed his mind. Given the caption, this seems entirely credible. “Cool shell formation on my beach walk” is not the language of a man with presidential murder in his heart. It is the language of a man who looked down, found something mildly diverting, and shared it, as people do, on Instagram, ten thousand times a day, without consequence. That this particular caption, on this particular day, in this particular climate, has become the subject of a federal prosecution with a twenty-year ceiling is the kind of thing one reads twice. Then once more. Then puts down for a moment and looks out of the window.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.