James Comey indicted for second time by Justice Department

A federal grand jury in North Carolina indicted former FBI director James B. Comey – the Justice Department’s latest attempt to criminally charge President Donald Trump’s longtime foe, according to people familiar with the legal proceedings.

The charges were not immediately clear, but the people familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information had not yet been made public, said the case stems from a photo that Comey posted online last year showing seashells on a beach that were arranged to write out “86 47.”

Trump is the 47th president; “86” can mean banning or removing someone, but it can also be slang for killing a person.

The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday afternoon. An attorney for Comey also declined to comment.

“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” Comey wrote in the original Instagram post, which he quickly removed after receiving criticism that the phrase communicated the threat of violence. In a follow-up post, Comey wrote that he assumed the shells he saw “were a political message” but said he was not advocating violence.

Comey has suggested that he stumbled on the shell formation on a walk along the beach and did not arrange the shells himself. There is generally a high legal threshold to charge someone with threatening a person based on their language, and legal experts said it would be tough for the Justice Department to build a strong case with just the seashells.

“Just James Comey casually calling for my dad to be murdered,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, wrote on social media after Comey’s seashell post.

Comey was named FBI director by President Barack Obama. Trump fired Comey four years later over his handling of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

In a separate case, the Justice Department in September indicted Comey in the Eastern District of Virginia on two counts alleging that he lied to Congress. The Virginia grand jury rejected a third count sought by government prosecutors involving another alleged false statement.

The Virginia indictment against Comey centered on testimony he gave in September 2020 during a hearing on the FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation. The indictment was delivered over the rare objections of career prosecutors who insisted there was insufficient evidence to charge Comey.

Ultimately, a judge tossed the indictment, ruling that the Trump administration unlawfully appointed then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan to run the office and oversee the case.

The Justice Department has not attempted to bring that case to a grand jury again.

Trump has called for Comey’s prosecution for years.

When Erik S. Siebert, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney who led the office before Halligan, concluded that the evidence was insufficient to charge, Trump forced him out of his job.

Last July, the Trump administration fired Comey’s daughter Maurene Comey – a well-regarded federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. She had worked on the criminal cases of Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

The younger Comey is suing the government over her firing, saying there was no reason to push her out of the job other than the president’s animosity toward her father or how officials perceived her political beliefs.