The Trump administration’s Justice Department has secured a second indictment against former FBI director James Comey, this time charging him with threatening the president’s life over a photograph of seashells arranged on a North Carolina beach. The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina, accuses Comey of posting to Instagram in May 2025 a picture of the numbers 86 and 47 spelled out in shells — a formation the government contends a reasonable observer would interpret as a coded call to assassinate the 47th president. The move comes five months after a federal judge threw out an earlier case against Comey on unrelated charges of lying to Congress, a dismissal linked to the illegal appointment of the prosecutor who brought it.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, a Trump loyalist who previously served as the president’s personal lawyer, insisted on Wednesday that Mr Trump had not directed the prosecution, telling CBS Mornings that the case had been investigated for nearly a year. Viewed from Washington, however, the timing and pattern invite cynicism: the administration is now pursuing its second prosecution of a prominent Trump critic in as many years, each resting on evidence that many legal analysts describe as threadbare. The slang term “86” — derived from restaurant argot meaning to discard or eliminate — combined with the reference to Mr Trump’s ordinal has been the flashpoint.

Comey, who deleted the post soon after publishing it, has maintained he did not realise the numbers carried violent connotations and vowed to fight the charges, stating in a video that he remains “still innocent, still not afraid, and still believe in the independent federal judiciary.” Legal experts across the political spectrum have expressed scepticism about the strength of the case. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley described it as facing a “monumental challenge under the First Amendment” if based solely on the image, while analysts in London and Berlin note that the indictment tests the boundaries of free speech protections that European courts have long treated as less absolute than America’s. The charge carries a potential sentence of up to ten years, but the more immediate significance may be political.

Critics argue the Justice Department is being systematically weaponised to settle personal scores, a charge the administration denies. As the case proceeds through the Eastern District of Virginia — where Comey appeared in court on Wednesday and was released without conditions — the question is whether the judiciary will again draw a line, or whether the slow erosion of prosecutorial restraint has become the new normal.