Former FBI Director James Comey said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that he did not regret his “86 47” social media post because it was “clever” and an artistic political point of view that he admired.

Host Nicolle Wallace said, “Take me back to the walk on the beach.”

Comey said, “We were walking on the beach. We went to the beach to prepare for this week, which was the launch of my book and to think about the book and to prepare to answer questions about it. And we were walking back towards the road and we saw in the sand someone had arranged shells with numbers. Patrice, my wife said, why would someone put an address in the sand? And I said, I don’t know. We stood over it and I said, I think it’s some kind of political message. She said, you know, 86 when I was a server, she did a lot of work in restaurants, meant to remove an item from the menu when you ran out of ingredients. 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. I did, and I posted it on my Instagram account and thought nothing more of it until I heard through her that people were saying it was some sort of a call for assassination, which is crazy, but I took it down. Even if I think it’s crazy. i don’t want to be associated with violence of any kind.”

Wallace asked, “Did you have any regret about posting the picture?”

Comey said, “Well, I regret the distraction and the controversy around it but again, it’s hard to have regret about something that even in hindsight, looks to me to be totally innocent for the reasons you said. Yeah, I didn’t have a gut check in the Trump era.”

He added, “I thought, what a clever way to express a political view. The shells were the same color for each of the letters, with different colors for the letters. It took a lot of work, somebody with artistic flair did that. I have a hard time believing it was anybody with a dark intention. It certainly was no dark intention on my part or on my spouse’s part.”

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