Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted for a second time on Tuesday in an investigation over a social media photo of seashells on a beach that officials said constituted a threat against President Donald Trump, multiple sources told US media.
The charge or charges against Comey were not immediately known.
It's the second criminal case the Justice Department has brought against the longtime Trump foe, who said he assumed the arrangement of shells he saw on a walk, reading "86 47," was a political message, not a call to violence.
Comey is one of several enemies of the president to come under scrutiny by the Justice Department over the last year, as acting Attorney General Todd Blanche aims to position himself as the right person to hold the job permanently.
Comey was interviewed by the Secret Service in May after Trump administration officials asserted that he was advocating the assassination of Trump.
Comey deleted the post shortly after it was made, writing: "I didn't realise some folks associate those numbers with violence" and "I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down."
His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment Tuesday.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary lists 86 as slang meaning "to throw out," "to get rid of" or "to refuse service to."
It notes: "Among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of 'to kill.' We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use."
Trump, in a Fox News Channel interview in May, accused Comey of knowing "exactly what that meant."
"A child knows what that meant," Trump said. "If you're the FBI director and you don't know what that meant, that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear."
The fact that the Justice Department pursued a new case against the ex-FBI director months after a separate and unrelated indictment was dismissed will likely spark defence claims that the Trump administration is going out of its way to target Comey, who had overseen the early months of an investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the outcome of that year's election.
The former FBI director was indicted in September on charges that he lied to and obstructed Congress related to testimony he gave in 2020 about whether he had authorised inside information about an investigation to be provided to a journalist.
He denied any wrongdoing and the case was subsequently dismissed after a judge concluded that the prosecutor who brought the indictment was illegally appointed.
Comey was the FBI director when Trump took office in 2017, having been appointed by then-President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and serving before that as a senior Justice Department official in President George W. Bush’s Republican administration.
But the relationship was strained from the start, including after Comey resisted a request by Trump at a private dinner to pledge his personal loyalty to the president, an overture that so unnerved the FBI director that he documented it in a contemporaneous memorandum.
Trump fired Comey in May 2017 amid an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump's presidential campaign.
That inquiry, later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, would ultimately find that while Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the Trump team welcomed the help, there was insufficient evidence to prove a criminal collaboration.
