Amidst the already-flaring ’86 47′ controversy with ex-FBI Director James Comey at its centre, Trump ally Laura Loomer shot hefty accusations at Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. Having found ‘assassination gear’ on the e-commerce platform, the conservative activist attached a screenshot of 8647-themed caps being sold on Amazon.

Under any other circumstance, such caps would’ve been deemed a random feature on the platform. However, it has not even been a week since the former FBI director came under severe scrutiny for sharing an image of an ‘8647’ shell-formation he stumbled upon during his beach walk. MAGA allies quickly associated the numbers being symbolic of James Comey pushing to incite violence against President Donald Trump, especially since ’47’ was seen as a direct reference to the Republican leader being the 47th POTUS, while ’86’ has often been associated with “to kill.”

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Laura Loomer accused Jeff Bezos’ Amazon of selling ‘assassination gear’

The Amazon.com screenshot shared by Laura Loomer showed four caps with the number 8647 on them. Three of these were presented as mere vintage caps, but the fourth one’s imagery made the matters even worse, as colours of the American flag were printed across the now-notorious four digits.

“Wow. They are selling ASSASSINATION GEAR on Amazon!” the MAGA influencer wrote on X early Tuesday morning (IST), tagging @JeffBezos.

Last week, Laura Loomer sounded off an alarm against Comey’s IG post in a similar exclamatory tweet. “WOW! Former FBI Director James Comey just posted this on his Instagram 2 hours ago, with the caption “cool shell formation on my beach walk.” It’s a pic of shells inas the form of ’86 47.” She branded the ex-FBI director’s SNS post “a call for the assassination of President Trump.”

Former FBI director James Comey controversy

Loomer’s addition to the ‘Trump assassination attempt‘ conspiracy theory followed around the time Comey finally spoke out about his ‘8647’ post that MAGA synonymously equated with a “murder threat.” Breaking his silence for the first time since the controversy, he claimed that it was his wife who suggested he took the picture as ’86’ was related to restaurants.

He defended his now-deleted social media activity as “totally innocent,” despite many decoding it as a message for the “assassination of President Trump.”

“We stood over it and I said, I think it’s some kind of political message and she said ’86 when I was a server… meant to remove and item from the menu when you ran out of ingredients,” James Comey shared with MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace.

Swerving clear of the fatal suggestions, he added, “And I said, well, to me, as a kid, it always meant to leave a place, to ditch a place. I said, that’s really clever… So then she said, ‘You should take a picture of that.’ And I did, and I posted it on my Instagram account and thought nothing more of it.”

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The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary’s description of the numbered-phrase aligns with these claims, as it explains the slang to mean “to throw out,” “to get rid of,” or “to refuse service to.” As for relatively more recent adoption of the meaning “to kill,” it says, “We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”

James Comey’s scathing dig at Trump administration despite previous apology

Comey even shrugged off MAGA camp’s disapproval of his post as “ridiculous,” noting, “It says something more depressing about the leadership of our current administration.” Prior to his actual verbal response, the former FBI boss issued an apology after deleting his IG post: “I didn’t realise some folks associated those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I opposed violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

What Trump said

As for how Trump, who’s always had a strained relationship with Comey, viewed it all, the US president said, “He knew exactly what that meant.” Doubling down on the numbers being evidently suggestive of an assassination attempt, he said during a Fox News interview, “A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.”