The Justice Department has secured a new indictment of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, over a social media post, after an indictment effort spurred by President Trump last year ended in failure.
An indictment filed in North Carolina charged Mr. Comey with making a threat against the president, and transmitting a threat across state lines, according to court records.
The new case represents another twist in the department’s tortured efforts to satisfy the demands of Mr. Trump to pursue criminal charges against Mr. Comey, a longtime target of the president’s wrath. The first indictment against Mr. Comey was thrown out by a judge, and other prosecutorial efforts against Trump targets have faltered in the face of grand juries or judges.
The indictment of Mr. Comey comes less than a month after the president fired his attorney general, Pam Bondi, over frustration with what advisers said was her handling of files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the department’s effectiveness in cases against his perceived enemies.
Ousting Ms. Bondi left Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, in charge of the department, and he has moved quickly to deliver cases against longstanding targets of the Trump administration. Last week, he announced an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that has for decades tracked hate groups, which the Trump administration now accuses of financial crimes in paying informants inside extremist organizations.
The new Comey charge stems from an incident nearly a year ago, when Mr. Comey, vacationing on the North Carolina coast, posted a photograph on social media showing seashells arranged to say “86 47,” combining the slang term “86” often used to mean dismiss or remove with an apparent reference to Mr. Trump, the country’s 47th president.
Members of the administration, as well as Mr. Trump’s family, declared that the meaning of “86” was to kill, and that the seashell message amounted to a threat to assassinate the president.
The three-page indictment makes a similar claim, stating that “a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret” the message written in seashells “as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to President Trump.”
Mr. Comey “did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the president of the United States,” the document charges.
Court records indicate an arrest warrant was also issued for Mr. Comey, but it was not immediately clear if the authorities would allow him to self-surrender.
Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, denounced the case as a sign that the Justice Department’s leaders are “desperate to continue to appease Donald Trump by appealing to his worst instincts and need for petty retribution.”
”Just like the last baseless indictment against Mr. Comey, this is another case of a weaponized Justice Department lashing out on behalf of a vengeful president,” he added.
After the seashell image was posted, the Secret Service tracked the location of Mr. Comey and his wife as they traveled from their vacation spot to their home in Northern Virginia.
When Mr. Comey learned of the uproar, he deleted the post, saying that he did not know that it had a violent connotation and that he opposed violence of any kind. The Secret Service interviewed him by phone that evening, and Mr. Comey said he had no intent to cause the president harm. The next day, he sat for an in-person interview. The Justice Department eventually dropped the matter, but it was revived in recent months.
It was the second time in the past year that the Justice Department sought to bring charges against Mr. Comey. According to court records, the case was assigned to Judge Louise W. Flanagan of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
In September, Mr. Comey was indicted by a grand jury in Virginia, accused of lying and obstructing a congressional investigation over testimony he gave in 2020. That indictment came after Mr. Trump fired the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia after he and career prosecutors in the office had determined the evidence did not support criminal charges against Mr. Comey.
In the fall, Mr. Trump intensified his public pressure campaign on the Justice Department. He publicly called upon Ms. Bondi to use her power to go after adversaries he has described as “scum,” including Mr. Comey and Letitia James, the New York attorney general who sued Mr. Trump for inflating the value of his business assets.
Ms. Bondi appeared to embrace the move in a social media post, without mentioning Mr. Comey by name, writing: “No one is above the law.”
The president replaced that prosecutor with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide with no previous prosecutorial experience. Ms. Halligan quickly secured a grand jury indictment against Mr. Comey, and then another in an unrelated case against New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, another longtime target of Mr. Trump.
Both indictments were dismissed in November, after a judge ruled that the Trump administration’s appointment of Ms. Halligan did not follow federal law for such positions.
Even though a judge ruled that certain evidence in the Comey case was off-limits to prosecutors, the Trump administration has signaled its intent to continue its pursuit of Mr. Comey.
The new effort to charge Mr. Comey comes less than a month after the president fired his attorney general, Pam Bondi, over frustration with what advisers said was her handling of files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the department’s effectiveness in cases against his perceived enemies.
Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/28/us/politics/james-comey-indictment.html
