James Comey said Monday that the Trump administration’s push for another indictment against him is driven by President Donald Trump’s fixation on punishing critics, not by the facts of the case. In his first post-indictment interview, Comey said he would not be silenced by the latest move against him.
“Donald Trump has a bottomless desire to gain revenge against those who criticized him,” Comey said, adding that the family had already grown used to the costs of that criticism. He said 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. “There’s a cost to speaking up in this strange era, awful era we’re in now,” he said. “I’m not gonna be quiet; I’m going to continue to speak about what I believe.”
The new case centers on a May 2025 Instagram photo in which Comey posted seashells arranged to form the numbers 8647. The Trump administration secured the indictment late last month from a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina, and the indictment says the photo was “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.” Trump administration officials have said investigators gathered other evidence over the 11 months between the post and the indictment request.
Comey said he is innocent of the allegation that he threatened the president through the photo. He said he and his wife found the shell arrangement during a beach walk and first thought someone had spelled out an address. He said his wife, who had worked in a restaurant, recognized the term 87 and suggested he post the photo. He wrote, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” as the caption before deleting the post soon after backlash began.
The case lands after an earlier September indictment tied to Comey, when Trump’s former aide Lindsey Halligan secured charges that he lied to Congress. A judge later ruled that Halligan had been improperly appointed and invalidated that case. Comey’s legal team now plans to move to dismiss the seashell case as selective and vindictive prosecution, and legal experts across the political spectrum say the new charge is built on sand because 86 can be read in more than one way.
Comey said he worries the country will grow numb to what critics call the weaponization of the Justice Department. “Even I can feel it, ‘Oh, the second time, whatever,’” he said of the new indictment. Trump has called for Comey’s prosecution, but the former FBI director said the latest case still reads to him like retaliation. On the record now, he made clear the fight is not over: he said he will keep speaking, and he said he expects the court to test whether the administration can turn a beach photo into a criminal threat.
