Federal grand jury indicts ex-FBI Director James Comey a second time over '86 47' post

A federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina returned an indictment on April 28, 2026, charging former FBI Director James Comey with two counts of threatening President Donald J. Trump. The charges rest on a May 15, 2025 Instagram post in which Comey shared a photo of seashells arranged to read "86 47" — captioned "Cool shell formation on my beach walk" — that the Justice Department contends a reasonable viewer would read as a call to harm the 47th president. Comey is charged under 18 U.S.C. § 871(a) (threatening the president) and 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) (transmitting a threat in interstate commerce), and faces a maximum of 10 years in prison. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced the case alongside U.S. Attorney W. Ellis Boyle.

The re-indictment came after an earlier DOJ prosecution of Comey was dismissed in 2025, when a court found the prosecutor who secured that indictment had been unlawfully appointed, and less than a month after Trump dismissed Attorney General Pam Bondi for what he described as insufficient aggressiveness in pursuing his agenda. Comey, who removed the post in 2025 after some readers interpreted it as a threat, has said he understood the numbers as political expression rather than a call to violence, and his lawyers have signaled they will challenge the charges as vindictive.

The case sharpens long-running concerns that federal prosecutorial power is being directed at the president's perceived adversaries. Charging a former FBI director over a social-media image — after a prior case against him collapsed and after the removal of an attorney general seen as insufficiently aggressive — implicates core First Amendment protections for political speech and the bar against selective and vindictive prosecution. An indictment is an accusation, not a conviction, and Comey is presumed innocent.