The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted former FBI Director James Comey for a second time, this time over an Instagram post from 2023. The post featured seashells arranged on a North Carolina beach to spell out the numbers 8647.
Comey claimed he discovered the shells already arranged during a walk and assumed it was a political message. Critics, however, interpreted the numbers as a call to "86"—a slang term meaning to "kill"—the forty-seventh U.S. president, Donald Trump.
The New York Times reported on May 21, 2024, that the government had filed new charges against Comey in connection with the post. The specific charges were not immediately disclosed. At the time of the post, the Secret Service located Comey on vacation with his family. He subsequently deleted the post and issued an apology.
"I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down," Comey said in 2023.
Following the post, then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard both called for Comey’s imprisonment. In a May 2024 interview with Fox News, former President Donald Trump dismissed Comey’s apology, stating:
"He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant."
This is not the first time Comey has faced legal trouble. In 2023, he was initially indicted on charges of false testimony and obstructing the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. However, that case collapsed due to insufficient evidence and procedural issues.
Prosecutors had warned that there was not enough evidence to support the charges, and concerns arose over the handling of evidence. A judge later ruled that U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan had been improperly appointed, rendering the indictments she signed against Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James void.
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