Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could face a federal investigation into an “86 45” emblem visible in the background of a virtual appearance she made several years ago.
The term 86 is slang used in the restaurant industry to signal something should be removed, like a menu item that’s out of stock or a disorderly person in a bar. President Donald Trump is the 45th and 47th president.
The Justice Department secured an indictment Tuesday against former FBI Director James Comey over a photo he posted last year of seashells on a beach arranged to read “86 47,” which prosecutors say was meant to be a threat to Trump’s life.
Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters during a press conference Tuesday that “other instances of threats against the president of the United States … will be investigated.”
“You cannot compare,” Blanche said. “It’s not fair to the American people, it’s not fair to the defendant, and it’s certainly not fair to the prosecutors to compare, ‘well, if you did it here, why didn’t you do it there?’”
Trump’s 2020 campaign accused Whitmer of “encouraging assassination attempts” against the president by having the emblem visible in the background of a virtual appearance on “Meet the Press.”
The interview was recorded days after federal agents thwarted an alleged plot to kidnap and kill Whitmer.
When specifically asked whether Whitmer’s 2020 appearance would also be investigated, Blanche did not rule that possibility out.
“Every case is different. The facts are different. Who makes the threat matters? What the threat says matters,” Blanche said.
ABC News noted that right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec “posted a Tweet with “86 46″ during Joe Biden’s presidency and recently interviewed Blanche at the Conservative Political Action Conference.”
At the time of Whitmer’s “Meet the Press” appearance, the governor said Trump was “inspiring and incentivizing and inciting this kind of domestic terrorism,” pointing to a rally he held in Muskegon after the plot was revealed where his supporters chanted “lock her up.”
Days later, at a rally in Whitmer’s hometown of Lansing during which Trump verbally attacked the governor four times, the president appeared to question the legitimacy of the plot.
“I’m the one, it was our people that helped her out with her problem,” Trump said. “I mean, we’ll have to see if it’s a problem, right? People are entitled to say maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn’t.”
The kidnapping plot has recently come back into the spotlight as Trump said last year that he would “take a look” at pardoning some of the men convicted in the plot.
Whitmer, who has taken a noticeably more conciliatory approach to Trump in his second term, told The Atlantic that she called Trump and said, “No, Mr. President, they had trials, and this is very serious.”
Nine men were convicted in connection with the plot and five were acquitted.
A federal appeals court upheld the convictions of two of the men last year, saying they had presented only “weak” evidence that they had been entrapped by the government.
