Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted for a second time, marking the latest effort by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to prosecute him.
The new charges, filed Tuesday in the Eastern District of North Carolina and announced at a press conference by FBI Director Kash Patel, stem from an Instagram photo that Comey briefly posted last year, which some perceived as menacing. The photo showed seashells arranged in the sand to spell out the numbers “86 47.”
He captioned the photo, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”
Court documents show that Comey has been charged with making a threat against the President and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce.
Comey was questioned by Secret Service agents last May about the post. At the time, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Comey had “just called for the assassination” of the President and that the Secret Service would investigate.
Trump supporters viewed the numbers as a threat, interpreting “86” as slang for “get rid of” or “eject” and “47” as a reference to Trump serving as the nation’s 47th President. Comey deleted the image the same day and later wrote that he believed the shell formation was simply “a political message.”
“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence,” Comey wrote on Instagram last year. “It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”
Patel claimed that Comey “knew full well the attention and consequences of making such a post,” adding that he had “disgracefully encouraged a threat on President Trump’s life and posted it on Instagram for all the world to see.”
Comey responded to the new charges on Tuesday afternoon by posting a video on social media.
“Well, they’re back, this time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won’t be the end of it,” Comey said in the video. “But nothing has changed with me. I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid, and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary, so let’s go!”
Comey was first indicted in late September 2025 on charges that he lied to Congress during testimony at a congressional hearing in September 2020. He pleaded not guilty. A federal judge dismissed that case in November after ruling that the prosecutor who brought the charges, Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed. The Justice Department appealed the dismissal, and Halligan later left her position.
Trump has publicly feuded with Comey since firing him as FBI director in 2017 during his first term. In a September post on Truth Social, Trump urged then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to move against Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, writing that “we can’t delay any longer.”
Bondi was removed as attorney general earlier this month and replaced by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney.
