Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said he’s pretty confident the Department of Justice’s new indictment against James Comey will be thrown out, given the new legal drama all stems from a photo of seashells.
Pritzker weighed in on the situation during a Tuesday appearance on MS NOW’s “Deadline: White House,” where he called the indictment against Comey an attack on the first amendment.
“So, this indictment is not the first indictment that they’ve gone after Comey with,” Pritzker told host Nicolle Wallace. “It’s not the first indictment of going after a political enemy of Donald Trump’s — or that he views as a political enemy.”
He added: “He threatened to jail me, even though he has no particular evidence of any crime or anything. He just announced that he wants to jail me … He thinks that he can use the power of the federal government to go after people that he doesn’t like.”
As the governor went on, he slammed the DOJ’s indictment as “wrong,” especially in the wake of the derailed White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which was supposed to be a celebration for “upholding the first amendment.”
“He is literally trying to prosecute somebody who is guilty of one thing, it seems, and that is putting out his first amendment views,” Pritzker said. “The picture of ’86-47′ [written out in seashells on a beach], that is what they’re using as evidence Comey is threatening the life of the president.”
“[Comey] posted it, even pulled it down because he thought it might be rude or improper to put it up,” he continued. “Not because he thought it was a threat against the president. But here they’re just using that alone to go after the man.”
While Pritzker felt badly for Comey, noting the former FBI director will be engaged in this legal drama for some time, he predicted the whole thing would be thrown out.
“The case is going to be thrown out,” he said. “I can almost guarantee you. We’re talking about seashells on a beach.”
Watch his full MS NOW appearance below.
Pritzker’s comments came shortly after the DOJ secured an indictment against Comey, which charged the former FBI director of threatening the life of the president for posting a photo on Instagram of the message “86-47” written out in seashells on the beach.
The post in-question, which was uploaded in May, was eventually taken down by Comey, who later defended that he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.”
In response to the indictment, Comey uploaded a video to Substack on Tuesday, in which he told his followers that “this is not who we are as a country, this is not how the Department of Justice is supposed to be.”
The Trump administration previously indicted Comey in September, alleging the former FBI director lied to Congress. However, the case was dismissed after a judge ruled that the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed.
