Justice Department indicts James Comey over Instagram post, grand jury issues arrest warrant
The Justice Department has indicted former FBI Director James Comey, accusing him of threatening the life of President Donald Trump through an Instagram post featuring seashells arranged to spell out “8647.” A grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina issued an arrest warrant for Comey, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced at a press conference on Tuesday.
The charge marks the second federal indictment Comey has faced since leaving government, and it arrives just days after a gunman allegedly stormed the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner in what prosecutors have described as a plot to assassinate the President and senior Cabinet members.
Blanche, who served as Trump’s personal attorney before joining the administration, did not mince words. As the Daily Mail reported, the acting attorney general framed the prosecution as a straightforward matter of law:
“You cannot threaten to kill the President of the United States. Full stop.”
The Instagram post at the center of the case
Last May, Comey posted a photo on Instagram showing seashells arranged to spell “8647,” accompanied by the caption: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” He deleted it the same day. But the damage, or the evidence, depending on your view, was already in circulation.
Trump and his allies immediately characterized the number as a coded call for assassination. “86” is slang for getting rid of something, though it can also mean to kill. “47” refers to Trump as the 47th President. The Justice Department’s indictment alleges Comey “knowingly and willfully” transmitted a threat via social media.
Comey later said he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.” The Secret Service moved quickly. Agents conducted an hours-long interview with Comey just a day after the post appeared. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed the Secret Service would investigate.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went further, saying Comey should be “put behind bars for this” and that she was “concerned” Trump’s life was in danger.
A winding road to prosecution
The path from that Instagram post to a grand jury indictment was not a straight line. The New York Times reported that the Justice Department initially dropped the seashells investigation under former Attorney General Pam Bondi. It was revived only in recent months, after Trump fired Bondi for what was described as failing to pursue his perceived enemies aggressively enough.
Blanche, widely considered the frontrunner to become Trump’s official nominee for attorney general, appears to have led the effort to revive the case. The DOJ has been scrutinizing Comey on multiple fronts, and this latest indictment fits a broader pattern of accountability for senior Obama-era intelligence officials whose conduct in and out of office has drawn sustained criticism.
It remains unclear whether the DOJ requested the arrest warrant as part of the initial indictment filing. Comey’s legal team had not issued a public statement as of the press conference.
The first indictment that didn’t stick
This is not the first time the Justice Department has tried to bring criminal charges against Comey since he left the FBI. Last fall, a federal grand jury in Virginia indicted him on two counts: making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding. Both charges related to his 2020 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
That case collapsed in November when a federal judge ruled that prosecutor Lindsey Halligan had been unlawfully appointed. The dismissal handed Comey a procedural victory, but it did nothing to resolve the underlying questions about his conduct, questions that have trailed him since he led the FBI’s investigation into alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.
The broader effort to hold former intelligence officials accountable has extended well beyond Comey. Grand jury subpoenas have targeted witnesses in a criminal probe of former CIA Director John Brennan, part of the same push to reexamine the actions of senior figures from the Obama era.
Kash Patel outlines SPLC fraud indictment, gang arrests, and foiled mass shooting in FBI weekly briefing
FBI Director Kash Patel and Acting Attorney General Blanche announced an 11-count grand jury indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center earlier this week, alleging the organization secretly funneled more than $3 million in donations to individuals tied to violent extremist groups, including people associated with the Ku Klux Klan and the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The SPLC indictment was one piece of a sprawling weekly enforcement briefing that read like a catalog of what happens when federal law enforcement actually does its job. From gang takedowns in Georgia and Southern California to a foiled mass shooting plot in Houston to the rescue of a child taken to Cuba, Patel’s Weekly Watch update covered arrests, indictments, and operations spanning at least nine states and multiple countries.
The breadth of the briefing matters. For years, critics on the right argued the FBI had become a politicized bureaucracy more interested in pursuing its own institutional vendettas than protecting ordinary Americans. Patel’s update offered a different picture, one field office after another reporting convictions, seizures, rescues, and disrupted plots.
The SPLC indictment: $3 million to extremists
The headline case was the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that has spent decades positioning itself as America’s foremost monitor of hate groups. Patel said the 11-count indictment alleges the SPLC funneled donated money to benefit people in extremist organizations and even encouraged their criminal conduct.
Patel described the recipients as members of “violent extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan” and “hate groups like the ones who organized the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.” He said the organization “secretly funneled more than $3 million dollars in donations to benefit people in these groups and even spur their criminal conduct.”
The irony is thick enough to cut. The SPLC built its brand, and its fundraising empire, by labeling mainstream conservative organizations as “hate groups.” It wielded that label to pressure tech companies, payment processors, and media outlets into blacklisting right-of-center voices. Now a federal grand jury has returned an indictment alleging the SPLC itself was channeling donor money to actual violent extremists.
Patel said the case “show[s] that no organization is above the law.” The court and jurisdiction behind the indictment were not disclosed in the briefing, and no case number was provided. But the charge count, eleven, suggests prosecutors believe they have a substantial paper trail.
Operation Sweet Silence dismantles Georgia gang
In Columbus, Georgia, FBI Atlanta led Operation Sweet Silence, which officials said dismantled the Zohannon Street Gang and its associates. The operation produced 30 convictions, the seizure of more than $270 million worth of drugs, and the confiscation of 119 firearms. The operation targeted violent crime and what officials described as cartel-linked drug trafficking.
Those are not small numbers. A quarter-billion dollars in drugs and more than a hundred firearms removed from a single operation in a mid-sized Georgia city tells you something about the scale of the narcotics pipeline running through American communities, and the firepower protecting it.
MS-13 members sentenced in Houston
In Houston, eight individuals identified as members of MS-13 were sentenced to decades in prison for murders carried out under the direction of gang leadership in El Salvador. The sentences reflect the transnational command structure of MS-13, where orders for killings on American soil originate thousands of miles away.
Patel also reported that FBI Charlotte and FBI Houston Joint Terrorism Task Forces, acting on a public tip, prevented a planned mass shooting targeting Houston’s Jewish community. The briefing did not name the suspect or provide details on the arrest, but the prevention of a targeted attack on a religious community through citizen cooperation and inter-office coordination stands as exactly the kind of work the bureau was built to do.
House Republicans probe ActBlue over suspected foreign donations as employees plead the Fifth
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan says Republicans are investigating the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue over what he calls mounting evidence that the organization accepted illegal foreign contributions, and then tried to cover it up when Congress came asking questions.
Jordan laid out the case describing a pattern of resignations, a firing, Fifth Amendment invocations, and what he characterized as misleading statements to Congress by ActBlue’s own leadership. The committee released an interim report the day before his appearance, and Jordan did not mince words about what it found.
The platform raises billions for Democrats every election cycle. Jordan told listeners the investigation has uncovered a troubling sequence: four senior fraud-prevention and legal staffers resigned, a fifth, the general counsel, was fired with a large severance package, and when Congress deposed all five, every one of them refused to answer questions.
146 times: the Fifth Amendment wall
The scale of that refusal is now documented. The ActBlue employees invoked the Fifth Amendment at least 146 times in depositions conducted between July and December 2025. Two current officials and three former lawyers declined to answer any substantive questions from congressional investigators.
19-year-old trans substitute teacher arrested for making online threats against Loudon County high school
Hadyn Dollery, of Chantilly, was arrested and charged with threats of bodily injury after he allegedly made threats at John Champe High School while online.
Hadyn Dollery, 19, is no longer available on the substitute teachers list for Loudon County Public Schools (LCPS). Dollery, of Chantilly, was arrested and charged with threats of bodily injury after he allegedly made threats at John Champe High School while online.
Dollery is male but identifies as transgender and has been booked into an adult detention center in Virginia as a male, according to reporter Nick Minock. He was arrested and is being held without bond at the Loudoun County Adult Detention Center, per WJLA. Authorities have not talked about the exact nature of the threats or who at the school they were directed at.
The sheriff’s office said they got information from the Safe2Talk app that led them to see that Dollery had made the statements threatening violence online. The case comes as there have been other instances of trans-identified suspects being involved in violence in the nation. Some critics of transgender ideology have pointed to the intervention with hormones as well as other sex-change measures as having negative impacts on the mental health of trans-identified individuals that can lead to criminal activity.
In a case highlighted in Utah earlier this week, a trans-identified male father attempted to take a child to Cuba for the purposes of sex change surgery. The child is 10 years old.
Those with more information about the Loudon County case should contact the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office at 703-777-1021.
