{"id":213161,"date":"2026-04-28T21:42:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T21:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/213161\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T21:42:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T21:42:13","slug":"ex-fbi-director-james-comey-indicted-for-threatening-to-kill-trump-in-86-47-instagram-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/213161\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-FBI Director James Comey indicted for threatening to kill Trump in ’86 47′ Instagram post"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014\u00a0Former FBI Director James Comey<\/a>\u00a0was indicted again Tuesday, this time by a federal grand jury for threatening to kill President Trump in a May 2025 Instagram post that called to \u201c86 47<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges during a news conference, saying that \u201cthreatening the life of the president of the United States will never be tolerated by the Department of Justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The indictment, handed up in the Eastern District of North Carolina, lists one count for \u201cknowingly and willfully\u00a0making a threat to take the life of and to inflict bodily harm upon the president\u00a0of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Department of Justice has indicted former FBI Director James Comey again, sources told The Post. REUTERS<\/p>\n

Comey posted the image to his Instagram on May 15, 2025. comey\/Instagram<\/p>\n

The other count was for\u00a0\u201cknowingly and willfully transmitting an interstate commerce communication that contained a threat to kill the president of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Comey, 65, posted an\u00a0image of seashells arranged on a beach to form the numbers \u201c86 47\u201d<\/a>\u00a0on his Instagram on May 15, 2025, before deleting the message.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He later told MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace that he found it a \u201ctotally innocent\u201d message to share and it was\u00a0\u201ccrazy\u201d that social media users and others saw it as a call for violence against the 47th president.<\/p>\n

The number \u201c86\u201d is restaurant industry slang for getting rid of something, whether unruly patrons or featured menu items.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are multiple threats cases very similar to this one, including one where the defendant pled guilty recently to threatening former President Biden,\u201d Blanche noted.<\/p>\n

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaking at a press conference at DOJ headquarters on the Comey indictment alongside FBI Director Kash Patel and US Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina Ellis Boyle. Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cI say that to say that while this case is unique and this indictment stands out because of the name of the defendant, his alleged conduct is the same kind of conduct that we will never tolerate and that we will always investigate and regularly prosecute.\u201d<\/p>\n

The charges were\u00a0first reported by CNN<\/a>\u00a0earlier Tuesday. One of Comey\u2019s defense attorneys in his earlier case involving alleged false statements to Congress declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Trump survived a third assassination attempt against his life by a crazed gunman who attempted to storm the White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner on Saturday<\/p>\n

Two earlier attempts were made by would-be assassins during Trump\u2019s 2024 campaign: at a rally in Butler, Pa., and on his Florida golf course.<\/p>\n

Comey was initially indicted on Sept. 25 last year\u00a0<\/a>on charges of making false statements and obstruction of justice, only for a federal judge to throw out the case two months later on the grounds that then-interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan was improperly appointed to her position and \u201chad no lawful authority\u201d to secure the indictment.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0earlier case hinged on an exchange Comey had with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)\u00a0<\/a>during a Sept. 30, 2020, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, during which the former FBI director denied authorizing leaks to media outlets related to the FBI\u2019s Trump-Russia investigation and a separate probe into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s use of a private server to store sensitive emails.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn May 3rd, 2017, in this committee, Chairman [Chuck] Grassley asked you point blank, \u2018Have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?\u2019 You responded under oath, \u2018Never,\u2019\u201d the line of questioning from Cruz began.<\/p>\n

Comey, 65, was initially indicted on Sept. 25 last year on charges of making false statements and obstruction of justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe then asked you, \u2018Have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton administration?\u2019 You responded again under oath, \u2018No.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The Texas Republican then noted that Comey\u2019s responses to Grassley (R-Iowa) appeared to be at odds with comments made by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who Cruz said \u201cpublicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Follow The Post\u2019s live coverage of President Trump and national politics for the latest news and analysis<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWho\u2019s telling the truth?\u201d Cruz asked.<\/p>\n

To which Comey responded, \u201cI can only speak to my testimony. I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was also not immediately clear\u00a0in which jurisdiction the grand jury convened, though the\u00a0ex-FBI boss\u2019s first indictment was handed up in the Eastern District of Virginia. Nick Ballasy \/ SplashNews.com<\/p>\n

Comey, who was fired by Trump six days after his May 2017 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, also testified that he \u201cnever\u201d was an anonymous source about investigations into Trump or\u00a0Hillary Clinton, and \u201cno,\u201d he had not authorized subordinates to be anonymous sources for journalists about the probes either.<\/p>\n

Yet in other testimonies to Congress and federal investigators, Comey confessed to leaking information to Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor whom the top G-man called a \u201cgood friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also in 2017, Comey told\u00a0the\u00a0Senate Intelligence Committee\u00a0that he had asked Richman\u00a0to\u00a0disseminate memos\u00a0<\/a>on Trump\u2019s purported instructions to shut down an investigation of Michael Flynn, the 45th president\u2019s first national security adviser.<\/p>\n

U.S. President Donald Trump (C) shakes hands with James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during an Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on January 22, 2017 in Washington, DC. Getty Images<\/p>\n

Another\u00a0DOJ watchdog investigation<\/a>\u00a0into Wall Street Journal leaks in 2018 found that Comey \u201cagreed it was a \u2018good\u2019 idea\u201d to share information with media on the Clinton email scandal, according to McCabe.<\/p>\n

\u201cComey and McCabe gave starkly conflicting accounts\u201d of that conversation, per the DOJ IG report, with the ex-FBI honcho denying McCabe\u2019s account.<\/p>\n

The first Comey indictment was filed days before the five-year statute of limitations was set to expire on Sept. 30, 2025.<\/p>\n

Comey posted a video on his Substack shortly after the charges were unsealed, saying,\u00a0\u201cMy family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn\u2019t imagine ourselves living any other way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014\u00a0Former FBI Director James Comey\u00a0was indicted again Tuesday, this time by a federal grand jury for threatening…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213162,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[383,5970,397,2842,9,11,10,87,58],"class_list":["post-213161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-department-of-justice","tag-fbi","tag-indictment","tag-james-comey","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-politics","tag-us-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}