President Donald Trump may have fired James Comey nearly a decade ago, but the former FBI director says he’s still living rent-free in the president’s head.
Appearing Monday on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Comey, 65, mocked what he described as President Donald Trump’s lingering “obsession” with him after federal prosecutors opened an investigation tied to his infamous “86 47” seashell post.
“Honestly, it’s crazy that I’m in a place where I’m 65 years old and I actually find it a little bit humorous to have this obsession by this 80-year-old man with me. I don’t know,” Comey told host Nicolle Wallace, referring to Trump’s yearslong fixation on the FBI chief he fired in 2017 amid the Russia election interference investigation.
The renewed legal push centers on a beach photo Comey posted in May 2025 showing seashells arranged to form the numbers “86 47”—a phrase Trump allies immediately framed as a mob-style assassination threat against the president, the 47th commander in chief.
The White House did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
At the time, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blasted the post as a call “for the assassination” of Trump, 79, and announced that the Department of Homeland Security and Secret Service would investigate the “threat,” which Comey had casually captioned: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”
No charges ever materialized from the original probe. But Comey warned at the time that the matter was far from over.
On Monday, he said Trump’s renewed pressure campaign only reinforced his belief that the president “wakes up at 3 in the morning thinking about me,” even while insisting Trump himself barely crosses his own mind.
“If this case falls apart, they’ll come up with something else,” Comey warned. “They’re going to have to deal with this as long as Donald Trump is in the White House thinking about me in the middle of the night.”
The latest legal drama comes after another revenge-driven case targeting Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, 67, collapsed last year.
That case—pushed by Trump’s handpicked prosecutor Lindsey Halligan—accused the pair of making false statements to Congress and obstructing congressional proceedings. The effort came weeks after Trump publicly demanded former Attorney General Pam Bondi pursue criminal charges against his political enemies.
Despite the failed case, Comey suggested that investigators may continue combing through his congressional testimony in search of anything they can weaponize against him before the five-year statute-of-limitations deadline.
“And I don’t think that’s going to be productive,” he said. “But they’ll continue working on it because that’s what the boss wants.”
He also took aim at what he described as a Justice Department increasingly staffed by loyalists unwilling to push back against Trump.
“There doesn’t appear to be anybody left who is willing to stand for institutional imperatives, norms, things like the rule of law in the face of a desire by the president,” Comey said.
Those who refuse to fall in line, he added, risk being quickly pushed aside.
“What it tells me is that he has found the crew that he was looking for,” Comey said, appearing to reference acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, 51, now steering the administration’s legal battles.
The aggressive legal push against Comey is already drawing backlash, even from within Trump’s own party.
Sen. Don Bacon, 62, told CNN last month that while he did not “defend Director Comey” for the post, he viewed the probe as both “foolish” and an “overreach.”
Bacon added that he could not envision a jury convicting Comey and predicted the prosecution would be “short-lived.”
Former Justice Department officials have reportedly been even harsher behind the scenes, with one source describing the revived case as “the worst case the DOJ has filed in my lifetime.”
