Trump administration pressured Secret Service to warrantlessly surveil Comey after 'seashells' post

On the night of May 15, 2025, Secret Service headquarters faced pressure from a high-level Justice Department official to secretly access former FBI Director James Comey's phone location data and track his movements, after President Trump and administration officials grew alarmed by Comey's Instagram photo of seashells on a North Carolina beach arranged to spell "86 47," which Trump aides characterized as a threat against the 47th president, according to internal Secret Service records later filed in federal court. A mid-level supervisor in the agency's Washington field office who handled the request wrote in a contemporaneous email that "at the time we did not believe anyone's life was in danger and legally it was a bad idea" to ping Comey's phone, noting the agency lacked a warrant and could invoke emergency tracking authority only if it had a reasonable belief Comey posed an imminent threat to someone's life.

Despite those internal objections, the Secret Service issued an emergency request to Verizon early the next morning, May 16, 2025, citing "an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury," and began tracking Comey's phone signal and physically following his car as he and his wife drove north through North Carolina toward their Virginia home. Records show Trump aides, including an official traveling with the president aboard Air Force One, closely followed the Secret Service's handling of the matter that night and the next day, with Trump seeking a copy of agents' interview notes ahead of a press conference.

The pressure campaign and warrantless tracking were disclosed more than a year later, on July 28, 2026, when Comey's attorneys filed the internal Secret Service emails as exhibits to a motion to dismiss the separate federal indictment charging Comey with threatening Trump over the same "86 47" post. Comey's lawyers characterized the surveillance as conducted "at the request of a high-level DOJ official" without a warrant, framing it as part of a broader pattern of vindictive and selective prosecution directed at a longtime Trump critic. The Justice Department and the Secret Service both declined to discuss the specifics of the internal records, citing the pending litigation.