Of all the prosecutions of Donald Trump’s enemies, the case against James Comey has always stood out for its tragicomic excess. The story begins in May of 2025, when Comey, vacationing on a North Carolina beach, posted a photo on Instagram of seashells arranged to read “86 47.” The former F.B.I. director’s caption described this as a “cool shell formation”; the Secret Service treated it as an actionable threat against Donald Trump, the forty-seventh President—“86” supposedly being organized-crime slang for killing and not, as most others understood it, a term used in restaurants for an item that has been taken off the menu.

Comey took down the photograph and agreed to an interview with Secret Service agents the next day, but the agency took the remarkable step of tailing Comey and his wife as they drove home to Virginia. At one point, agents lost track of their car, after the Comeys turned off the highway to visit the gravesite of their son, who had died in infancy three decades earlier. The interrupted surveillance wasn’t a problem for the Secret Service, however, as a tranche of documents filed in federal court this week by Comey’s lawyers show. In an extraordinary, and legally dubious, move, a senior Justice Department official had directed the Secret Service to obtain emergency electronic tracing of Comey’s cellphone—a measure that requires evidence of “imminent threat to life.” In a review of the episode, one Secret Service official wrote, “I suggested that pinging the cell phone is legally questionable.” A more senior official agreed, the official continued, “but said we might anyway.” Another official, who led the questioning of Comey later that day, concluded, in an e-mail to colleagues, “This incident will constitute a story that we will be telling the rest of our careers.”

Eleven months later, Comey was charged with having “knowingly and willfully” made “a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States.” A “reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances,” the indictment alleged, would understand the seashell photo “as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.” This is not a case any normal prosecutor would bring under any normal circumstances. The sole signatory on the indictment, Matthew Petracca, a former state Medicaid-fraud lawyer, had been appointed as an Assistant U.S. Attorney just two days earlier. But Trump has been after Comey for the better part of a decade, since firing him as F.B.I. director, in May, 2017, assailing him as “a proven LEAKER & LIAR,” “a weak and untruthful slime ball,” and a “dirty cop.”

In the new court documents, Comey’s lawyers argue that the indictment should be dismissed for two reasons: that the First Amendment permits punishment only for making “true threats,” not merely repeating “a well-known political slogan”; and that the Constitution bars selective and vindictive prosecution. If Comey has broken the law, so, it seems, have many others. During Joe Biden’s Presidency, the conservative influencer Jack Posobiec tweeted, “86 46.” In 2024, then Representative Matt Gaetz—whom Trump nominated for Attorney General—wrote, after various Republicans were removed from leadership positions, “We’ve now 86’d: McCarthy McDaniel McConnell.” In fact, as the acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has acknowledged, the term “86 47” is “posted constantly.”

In addition to the strength of their legal arguments, the new documents offer a glimpse into the Trump Administration’s frantic efforts to gin up a case against Comey. After questioning Comey and his wife, the Secret Service backed away from opening a full investigation. Federal prosecutors in Virginia were also reluctant to pursue the seashell case—although they did bring a separate, and nearly as questionable, perjury prosecution against Comey. (It was later dismissed because Lindsey Halligan, the U.S. Attorney who oversaw the case, had not been legally appointed.) Federal prosecutors in North Carolina stepped in, and turned to the F.B.I., which obliged with a full-scale investigation. That pursuit ramped up, the documents show, after Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi in April for, among other things, failing to punish his political enemies with sufficient vigor. In May, shortly after Comey’s indictment, Blanche—by then the acting Attorney General and angling to get the top spot on a permanent basis—contended that the government had more to go on than the single photo. “Rest assured, it’s not just the Instagram post that leads someone to get indicted,” Blanche asserted.

If that evidence exists, it has yet to appear. Instead, the documents depict how investigators, seemingly desperate to show that Comey, as a former organized-crime prosecutor, would have understood “86” to mean “kill” or “murder,” scoured the F.B.I.’s database for evidence of the term being used that way. “These searches,” they reported, “produced inconclusive results.” Agents studied the 1993 federal case against the Mob boss John Gambino, in which Comey had been the lead prosecutor; they could find no references to the term “86,” including in one transcript they hurriedly searched the night before Comey’s indictment. They questioned two retired F.B.I. agents who had specialized in organized-crime cases; neither expressed familiarity with the term in that context. Google AI and ChatGPT, queried at the direction of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina after the indictment was issued, were similarly unhelpful. Only Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano—a former underboss for the Gambino crime family who was one of Comey’s coöperating witnesses—said “86” was a Mob term for “get rid of,” and he didn’t recall discussing the phrase with Comey. Gravano directed agents to a former prosecutor and retired federal judge, John Gleeson—who not only could not confirm Gravano’s statement but went on to provide an affidavit to Comey’s team. “The claim that ‘86’ is mafia jargon for ‘kill’ is preposterous,” Gleeson wrote. “If it weren’t made in the context of seeking to deprive a man of his liberty, it would be laughable.” (Actual mobsters, Gleeson noted, favor terms like “whack” and “clip.”)

The filings also show the Administration, the White House, and Trump himself keeping unusually close tabs on the investigation. Comey’s initial interview at the Secret Service’s Washington field office, in May, 2025, was attended by the general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, the general counsel and deputy chief counsel for the Secret Service, and a federal prosecutor from the Eastern District of Virginia—hardly the ordinary cohort. Meanwhile, Trump, who was travelling in the Middle East, insistently sought updates on the inquiry. “It is a hot topic on the plane and [redacted code name for President Trump] is very interested,” John Bush, the special agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division, wrote in one e-mail. He followed up, seeking further information: “The COS just asked me,” Bush wrote, referring to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Another agent advised, “POTUS was requesting a copy of the interview notes.” That evening, Trump, speaking to Fox News’ Bret Baier, said of Comey, “He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant . . . that meant assassination.”

As it happened, when Comey’s lawyers filed their papers, Blanche’s nomination for Attorney General was heading toward an uncertain conclusion in the Senate. Two Republican senators—both departing the chamber after this year—have demanded more limits on the controversial, and supposedly abandoned, $1.8-billion anti-weaponization fund and the I.R.S. audit immunity that Blanche had arranged on Trump’s behalf. The senators, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, did not cite Blanche’s role in overseeing the Comey prosecution as a reason for their concern. But, as the new documents show, that embarrassing episode constitutes separate, and sufficient, grounds for opposing Blanche’s confirmation. ♦