Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asserted Thursday that federal law enforcement has initiated an inquiry into a social media communiqué disseminated by erstwhile FBI Director James Comey, which she and fellow Republicans interpret as an implicit exhortation to violence directed against President Donald Trump.

Comey's Instagram post, captioned "cool shell formation on my beach walk," featured a photograph of seashells whose arrangement, perhaps coincidentally, evoked the numerical sequence "86 47."

Several luminaries of the Trump administration, Noem amongst them, posited that Comey was advocating for the extrajudicial termination of the then-47th President. Noem stated, "The Department of Homeland Security and Secret Service are actively investigating this putative threat and will implement commensurate countermeasures."

Merriam-Webster, the lodestar dictionary for the Associated Press, defines "86" in its argot sense as encompassing meanings from proscription and disposal to service denial, further elucidating that a nascent, albeit sparsely documented, extension of the term denotes "to kill," a usage the dictionary prudently withholds endorsement from due to its relative ephemerality and circumscribed application.

The aforementioned post has been expunged; Comey later elucidated, "My earlier publication of a photograph depicting seashells encountered during a littoral perambulation was predicated on the erroneous assumption that they constituted a veiled political communiqué. I was hitherto unaware that certain demographics associate the numerical configuration thereof with acts of egregious violence."

Comey's initial foray into the digital sphere ignited a firestorm of conservative indignation, culminating in Donald Trump Jr.'s incendiary accusation that Comey had effectively issued a veiled call for patricide.

Kash Patel, the incumbent FBI Director, acknowledged cognizance of the aforementioned communication and is currently in liaison with the Secret Service and its directorate.

James Blair, White House deputy chief of staff for legislative, political and public liaison, underscored the acute sensitivity of the appointment, coinciding as it did with President Trump's diplomatic tour of the Middle East.

Blair's pronouncements on X constituted a thinly veiled incitement, a latter-day papal bull effectively sanctioning—if not outright soliciting—the assassination of the President of the United States by terrorist factions and inimical foreign powers during his sojourn in the Middle East, an act fraught with geopolitical ramifications.

Comey, the erstwhile FBI Director (2013-2017), was summarily dismissed by Trump during the latter's inaugural term, precipitated by the Bureau's investigation into putative links between Russian operatives and the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, a period subsequently chronicled in Comey's *magnum opus*, the best-selling memoir "A Higher Loyalty."

Now a purveyor of crime narratives, he is currently engaged in the promotional circuit for his latest literary offering, "FDR Drive," slated for release this coming Tuesday.