Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted again Tuesday, this time in an investigation over a social media photo of seashells arranged on a beach that officials said constituted a threat against President Donald Trump.
Watch the Justice Department’s news conference in the video player above.
The criminal case is the second in a matter of months against Comey and is part of the Trump administration Justice Department’s relentless effort to prosecute political opponents of the Republican president.
READ MORE: Comey is under investigation for posting ’86’ in reference to Trump. What does it mean?
The seashells photo was posted nearly a year ago, but the indictment was secured as acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, a Trump loyalist who previously served as his personal lawyer, aims to prove to the president that he’s the right person to hold the job permanently.
The fact that the Justice Department pursued a new case against the ex-FBI director months after a separate and unrelated indictment was dismissed could open the government to claims of a vindictive prosecution and to arguments that it is going out of its way to target Comey, who had overseen the early months of an investigation into whether the Republican president’s 2016 campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the outcome of that year’s election. Comey was fired by Trump months into the president’s first term, and they have openly feuded ever since.
The prosecution arises from a May post on Instagram in which Comey shared a photo of seashells he saw on a walk in the arrangement of “86 47.” He has said he assumed that the numbers reflected a political message, not a call to violence. Comey deleted the post shortly after it was made, writing: “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” and “I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”
The case was filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina, the state where Comey found the seashells.
