A federal grand jury has returned an indictment charging former FBI Director James Comey over an Instagram photo he posted of seashells, which allies of President Donald Trump portrayed as a threat, two sources familiar with the matter tell NBC News.
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Justice Department attorneys sought the indictment in the Eastern District of North Carolina, where Comey has a beach house. The Department of Homeland Security investigated Comey, who has long been a Trump target, over the May 2025 Instagram post, even subjecting him to questioning by the Secret Service.
Comey had deleted the post, saying it never occurred to him that it would be interpreted as being violent. “Eighty-six” is a term commonly used in restaurants when an item is sold out, and it’s also informally used to mean “cancel” or “get rid of.”
In a subsequent Instagram post last May, Comey said that he assumed the shells that he saw on a beach walk were “a political message,” and that he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence,” adding that he opposed violence “of any kind.”
The White House referred all questions on this matter to the Justice Department.
Trump administration officials had quickly rallied to condemn Comey over the post last May, with then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem boasting that Secret Service agents interviewed the man she called the “disgraced” former FBI director, while Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Comey should be “put behind bars for this.”
The Trump administration previously indicted Comey on charges alleging he lied to Congress five years ago, in a case that was dismissed after a judge ruled that the prosecutor behind the original case, a former lawyer for Trump, was unlawfully appointed.
Comey was first indicted in September on charges of making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation. The Justice Department charged him just days before the statute of limitations expired. The case centered on testimony Comey gave to Congress in 2020 in which he said he stood by his congressional testimony in 2017 that he did not authorize any third party to speak to the media about an FBI investigation.
A judge dismissed the first case against Comey, as well as one against New York Attorney General Letitia James, citing the “unlawful” Trump appointment of Lindsey Halligan as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan was the sole prosecutor to sign the Comey and James indictments.
Prosecutors face only a low probable cause standard when trying to secure an indictment from a federal grand jury, not a unanimous guilty verdict that a defendant committed a crime beyond any reasonable doubt as required at trial.
Trump had publicly urged Bondi to take legal action against Comey, as well as James. Trump soured on Comey, a lifelong Republican, shortly after he took office in 2017. He fired Comey in May 2017. His firing sparked the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, a probe that routinely drew the president’s ire.
