The Justice Department has secured a new indictment of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, over a social media post, after a past indictment effort spurred by President Trump last year ended in failure, according to people familiar with the investigation.
The new case represents another twist in the department’s tortured efforts to satisfy the demands of Mr. Trump to pursue criminal charges against Mr. Comey, a longtime target of the president’s wrath.
The charge stems from an incident nearly a year ago, when Mr. Comey, vacationing on the North Carolina coast, posted a photograph on social media showing seashells arranged to say “86 47,” combining the slang term “86” often used to mean dismiss or remove in reference to Mr. Trump, the country’s 47th president.
Members of the administration, as well as Mr. Trump’s family, declared that the meaning of “86” was to kill, and that the message amounted to a threat to assassinate the president.
After the image was posted, the Secret Service went so far as to track the location of Mr. Comey and his wife as they traveled from their vacation spot to their home in Northern Virginia.
When Mr. Comey learned of the uproar, he deleted the post, saying that he did not know that it had a violent connotation and that he opposed violence of any kind. The Secret Service interviewed him by phone that evening, and Mr. Comey said he had no intent to cause the president harm. The following day, he sat for an in-person interview. The Justice Department eventually dropped the matter, but it was revived in recent months.
Mr. Comey was indicted in September by a grand jury in Virginia, accused of lying and obstructing a congressional investigation over testimony he gave in 2020. That indictment came after Mr. Trump fired the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia after he and career prosecutors in the office had determined the evidence did not support criminal charges against Mr. Comey.
The president replaced that prosecutor with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide with no previous prosecutorial experience. Ms. Halligan quickly secured a grand jury indictment against Mr. Comey, and then another in an unrelated case against New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, another longtime target of Mr. Trump.
Both indictments were dismissed in November, after a judge ruled that the Trump administration’s appointment of Ms. Halligan did not follow federal law for such positions.
Despite an additional legal setback in which a judge ruled certain evidence in the Comey case off-limits to prosecutors, the Trump administration has signaled its intent to continue its pursuit of Mr. Comey.
The new effort to charge Mr. Comey comes less than a month after the president fired his attorney general, Pam Bondi, over frustration with what advisers said was her handling of files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the department’s effectiveness in cases against his perceived enemies.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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