James Comey said Monday that the Trump administration’s pursuit of another indictment against him shows what he called the president’s fixation on punishing critics, escalating a fight that began with a beach photo and has now returned to federal court. In his first post-indictment interview, Comey said, “Donald Trump has a bottomless desire to gain revenge against those who criticized him.”
The new case was returned late last month by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina and centers on a May 2025 Instagram post in which Comey shared a photo of seashells arranged to form the numbers 8647. The indictment says the arrangement was “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States,” while administration officials say investigators gathered other evidence during the 11 months between the post and the request for charges.
Comey’s response on MS NOW was blunt. He said there is a danger the country will become “numb” to what critics have called the weaponization of the Justice Department, and added, “I’m not gonna be quiet; I’m going to continue to speak about what I believe.” He also said he has paid a personal price for that posture, saying his daughter was fired as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and his son-in-law resigned as a prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia.
The case lands after Trump again called for Comey’s prosecution and after a separate effort against him collapsed. Trump’s former aide Lindsey Halligan secured an indictment in September on charges of lying to Congress, but a judge later ruled that Halligan had been improperly appointed as a top prosecutor and invalidated the case. Comey’s lawyers now say they will move to dismiss the seashell case as a product of selective and vindictive prosecution.
Comey had already tried to explain the photo himself. He told Stephen Colbert last year that he and his wife found the seashell arrangement during a beach walk, and said his wife suggested he post it after they realized it carried a political message. He captioned the image “Cool shell formation on my beach walk” before deleting it amid backlash. Comey said Monday that he plans to keep speaking out because he wants his grandchildren to know what he did during this period, even if that brings consequences. “This is not normal. This is not who we are,” he said.
The immediate question is not whether the dispute will linger. It is whether the new indictment can survive the same kind of legal scrutiny that sank the earlier one, especially with the defense already calling it retaliatory and a judge having already wiped out a prior case tied to Comey.
