The Justice Department’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey spawned a debate in D.C. circles over the term “86” he used in a since-deleted Instagram post — one that DOJ officials allege was meant as a call to kill the president.
But a New York Times reporter known for her sources in Trumpworld joked in a CNN segment Wednesday night that few people would take the meaning of Comey’s Instagram post that way as she recalled her time in the restaurant biz and the original meaning of the Depression-Era term.
Maggie Haberman appeared on CNN’s The Source on Wednesday and told host and White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins that she used the term frequently when working at a restaurant as a server. She told Collins: “It originally was a restaurant term, as I understand it, and certainly when I was working at a restaurant, and we were saying we were 86-ing Steak au Poivre, it was because we were out of Steak au Poivre.
“It wasn’t because somebody wanted to hurt the Steak au Poivre,” she cracked.
Haberman is correct; to “86” something at a restaurant generally means to remove it from the menu for an evening and its derivation is originally linked back to that usage in the 1930s.
Legal experts agreed that there wasn’t much ground to charge Comey for the post, which originally appeared on Instagram last summer and depicted the numbers “86 47” written out in seashells on a North Carolina beach. “47” refers to Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States.
Comey, a former FBI director, earned Trump’s longtime emnity in 2016 and 2017 when his agency investigated the first Trump campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, which the president has described as an effort by the Obama administration to spy on and sabotage his campaign.
Comey was charged this week and surrendered to police on Wednesday.
He was originally investigated for the post by Secret Service agents in May of last year, but that investigation stalled for nearly a year as the DOJ then tried to bring him up on separate charges of lying to Congress. That charge was dismissed after it was ruled by a judge that the Trump appointee running the case was appointed illegally to her position.
“This won’t be the end of it. But nothing has changed. I’m still innocent; I’m still not afraid. I still believe in an independent justice system,” Comey said in a video post to his substack on Tuesday after the charges were announced.
The campaign against Comey and other enemies of the president at the Department of Justice has gone on for months and has led to the resignations of many longtime career DOJ employees and prosecutors. At the Eastern District of Virginia, where the charges were brought, a series of high level officials quickly exited the office last year as Trump’s pressure to charge his enemies with crimes grew.
“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way,” Comey said in a statement last year upon his initial indictment. “We will not live on our knees and you shouldn’t either.”
“My heart is broken for the Department of Justice,” he added.
His initial indictment last year immediately followed Donald Trump’s public demand for the Department of Justice to take action against him, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully prosecuted the Trump Organization for fraud.
In a Truth Social post, the president urged Pam Bondi to begin issuing indictments, an unprecedented step for an American president. The Wall Street Journal later reported the post was meant as a direct message.
“Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,’” Trump posted in September of 2025.
Constitutional law experts now mostly agree that there is little independence remaining at the Justice Department, which now largely operates as an arm of the Trump White House.
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