A federal grand jury has indicted former FBI Director James Comey on charges of making threats against the President of the United States, the Department of Justice announced on Tuesday, 28 April 2026. If convicted, Comey faces up to ten years in prison.
The indictment centres on a single Instagram post from May 2025. Comey had photographed seashells arranged in the sand to form the numerals “86 47” and uploaded the image to his account. The DOJ alleges that “a reasonable recipient familiar with the circumstances” would interpret the post as “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the president of the United States.”
The Numbers
In American slang, particularly in the bar and restaurant trade from which it originated, “to 86” something means to remove it from a menu or, by extension, to eliminate it. The number 47 is, in the present moment, unambiguous – Donald Trump is the 47th President of the United States. Read together, the sequence “86 47” can be parsed as a directive to eliminate the 47th president. That is the reading the Department of Justice is now asking a jury to accept beyond a reasonable doubt.
Comey, in a statement following the original online backlash, said he “didn’t realize some people associate those numbers with violence” and deleted the post.
The Acting Attorney General
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the indictment with the following framing: “Threatening the life of the president of the United States is a grave violation of our nation’s laws. This country has witnessed violent incitement followed by deadly actions against President Trump and other elected officials.”
The reference to “deadly actions” is not abstract. The indictment lands four days after the 26 April shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which Cole Tomas Allen of California, charged with attempted assassination of the President, fired on a Secret Service agent at close range outside the ballroom. Trump also survived two armed attempts during the 2024 election cycle.
Comey’s Path
Comey served as FBI Director from 2013 to 2017, appointed under President Barack Obama. He was dismissed by Trump in May 2017 in connection with the Russia investigation, and has been one of the President’s most prominent and persistent critics in the years since, comparing Trump to a mob boss in his memoir A Higher Loyalty.
This is not Comey’s first indictment under the second Trump administration. In 2025 a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of lying to Congress; that case was subsequently dismissed by the presiding judge. The current charge is a separate matter, brought by a separate grand jury, on different facts.
The Open Question
The case will turn on what a jury concludes a reasonable observer would have inferred from a photograph of seashells in sand. Defenders of Comey argue that no such inference is reasonable – that beach photographs of numerals are not, on their face, threats. Supporters of the prosecution argue that a former FBI director, posting that specific numerical sequence about a sitting president, in a country in which “86” is a recognised verbal shorthand for elimination, was not arranging shells at random.
Whichever reading the jury accepts, the broader pattern is in the open record. The senior official who once oversaw the federal investigative apparatus is being prosecuted by it. The Justice Department that protected him is the Justice Department that is now charging him.
