The Department of Justice indicted former FBI Director James Comey for a second time over a social media post he made last year, reopening a fight that has followed him since he was fired in 2017. The now-deleted Instagram post showed seashells on a beach arranged to spell out “86 47.”
Comey wrote “Cool shell formation on my beach walk” in the caption. The number 86 is sometimes used in service-industry slang to mean removing something, while 47 was a reference to Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. Some critics interpreted the post as a call to harm Trump, and Comey said in an interview with MSNBC that he did not regret sharing the image and had “thought nothing more of it” until his wife told him people were reading it as a call for assassination.
Trump said in an interview with that Comey knew “exactly what that meant.” He added, “A child knows what that meant,” and said, “If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.” Kristi Noem also said Comey should be investigated by the Secret Service for what she described as a call “for the assassination” of Trump.
The latest indictment comes after Comey was indicted in September on charges that he lied to and obstructed Congress in connection with 2020 testimony, including whether he authorized the release of information about an investigation to a journalist. He denied wrongdoing in that case, which was dismissed in November after a judge ruled the prosecutor had been illegally appointed.
The clash has roots in 2017, when Trump fired Comey during his first term amid an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign. Now the former FBI chief is facing a new criminal case over a single image, and the dispute over what he meant has become part of a far larger political fight than a beach photo should ever have carried.
