A federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina has indicted former FBI Director James Comey and issued an arrest warrant, accusing him of threatening the life of President Donald Trump through a social media post featuring seashells arranged to spell out "8647." Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges at a Tuesday press conference, marking the second time the Justice Department has brought charges against Comey since Trump returned to office.
The indictment centers on an Instagram post Comey made last May. The photo showed shells on a beach with the caption, "Cool shell formation on my beach walk." The number "86" is slang for getting rid of something, though it can also mean to kill. "47" refers to Trump, the 47th president. The Justice Department accused Comey of "knowingly and willfully" transmitting a threat via social media.
Comey deleted the post the same day, claiming he "didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence." Secret Service agents interviewed him for hours the following day. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said at the time that the Secret Service would investigate. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went further, saying Comey should be "put behind bars for this" and that she was "concerned" Trump's life was in danger.
Blanche, who served as Trump's personal attorney before joining the administration, left no ambiguity about the Justice Department's position. As the Daily Mail reported, Blanche told reporters:
"You cannot threaten to kill the President of the United States. Full stop."
The acting attorney general is widely considered a frontrunner to become the president's official nominee for the permanent attorney general post. His push to indict Comey came roughly a month after Trump fired his predecessor, Pam Bondi. The New York Times reported that the seashells investigation had initially been dropped under Bondi but was revived in recent months under Blanche's leadership.
The timing raises its own questions. In September, Trump posted a message on Truth Social pressuring Bondi to prosecute political enemies, including Comey. That message came just days before Comey's first indictment last fall, a separate case brought by a federal grand jury in Virginia on two counts: making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding, both related to his 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony.
That Virginia case collapsed in November when a federal judge dismissed it, ruling that prosecutor Lindsey Halligan had been unlawfully appointed. Now the Justice Department has come back with a different charge, in a different jurisdiction, on a different set of facts.
Comey responded Tuesday evening with a Substack video message, declaring his innocence and framing the prosecution as a departure from American norms. He said:
"I'm still innocent, I'm still not afraid and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary, so let's go."
He also told viewers:
"It's really important that all of us remember, this is not who we are as a country, this is not how the Department of Justice is supposed to be."
No public statement from Comey's legal team had been issued as of the time of reporting. The specific charges in the new indictment, the case number, and the presiding judge have not been publicly detailed. It also remains unclear why the arrest warrant was issued in the Eastern District of North Carolina specifically, or whether the DOJ requested the warrant as part of the initial indictment process.
Comey is not the only prominent Trump adversary to face charges from this Justice Department. New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted on bank fraud charges last October, though a federal judge later dismissed that case as well. James led the civil fraud lawsuit against Trump that resulted in a $454 million judgment in February 2024, a penalty the New York state appeals court later overturned.
The pattern is clear enough to critics: officials who pursued Trump during his first term now find themselves on the receiving end of federal prosecution. Supporters of these cases counter that no one, including former FBI directors, should be above the law when credible threats against a sitting president are at stake.
The indictment also arrives in a heightened security environment. Just days before the charges were announced, Cole Tomas Allen allegedly stormed the Washington Correspondents' Dinner in what prosecutors described as a plot to assassinate the President and his top Cabinet members. That incident prompted sharp demands from lawmakers like Sen. Rick Scott for Democrats to end a funding standoff and pay the Secret Service in the wake of the latest threat.
The dinner shooting also raised immediate questions about presidential protection protocols. Rep. Michael McCaul called on the Secret Service to rethink joint events involving the president and vice president in light of the security breach.
At the heart of this case is a judgment call: was Comey's Instagram post a coded threat against the president, or an innocent beach photo posted by a man who claims he didn't understand what "8647" signified? Comey's explanation, that he simply didn't know the numbers carried violent connotations, strains credulity for anyone who has spent time on social media in the Trump era. He was, after all, the former director of the FBI, a man whose career was built on reading signals and understanding coded language.
But credulity and criminal liability are different things. Whether a federal jury in North Carolina will find that a seashell photo constitutes a knowing and willful threat to the president's life is a question that has never been tested quite like this. The broader debate over double standards around political violence only sharpens the stakes.
Comey led the FBI's investigation into alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Trump fired him the following year. The animosity between the two men has defined a chapter of American political life. Every legal action involving Comey now carries that freight, whether prosecutors acknowledge it or not.
The cultural atmosphere around threats to the president has grown darker in recent months. The Allen incident at the Correspondents' Dinner was only the most dramatic example. An Ohio teacher was fired after a TikTok video appeared to lament Trump surviving that shooting, a reminder that the temperature around political violence has reached a point where even social media posts carry real consequences.
That is the environment in which Blanche and the Justice Department chose to revive a case that Bondi's team had set aside. Whether you view this as the rule of law applied without fear or favor, or as a political prosecution dressed in legal clothing, depends largely on whether you believe a former FBI director genuinely didn't know what "8647" meant when he posted it for the world to see.
The arrest warrant has been issued. Comey says he's ready to fight. The Justice Department says threatening a president is a line no one gets to cross. The first indictment fell apart on a procedural technicality. This time, Blanche appears to have chosen his venue and his charge with more care.
Open questions remain. What exact statute does the new indictment cite? Will Comey challenge jurisdiction in North Carolina? And will the Justice Department's track record of dismissed cases against Trump's political opponents, Comey in Virginia, James in New York, undermine its credibility before a jury, or sharpen its resolve to finally secure a conviction?
For years, the left's preferred institutions pursued Trump with every legal tool at their disposal and called it accountability. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and they call it persecution. The country will be better served when both sides agree on a simpler principle: the law applies to everyone, and threatening a president, by any medium, in any code, is not protected speech. If Comey is innocent, a jury will say so. That's how the system is supposed to work.
