Comey Lawyers Say Secret Service Illegally Tracked Him Over Seashell Photo, Cite Trump Requests for Updates

James Comey's lawyers say the U.S. Secret Service illegally surveilled the former FBI director in May 2025, tracking his cellphone and following him and his wife as they drove home from North Carolina, including a stop at their deceased son's grave.

The claim comes from a motion filed Tuesday night in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, first reported by CNBC. Comey's attorneys are asking the judge to dismiss his indictment on grounds of vindictive and selective prosecution.

The case centers on an Instagram photo Comey posted on May 15, 2025, showing seashells arranged on a North Carolina beach spelling out "8647." He captioned it "cool shell formation on my beach walk" and deleted it hours later, according to Reason. Prosecutors say the post was a coded threat to assassinate Trump, the 47th president. "86" is common slang for getting rid of something, most familiar from restaurant kitchens signaling an item is unavailable.

According to the court filing, a Secret Service special agent in charge asked, the day of the post, "about the possibility of pinging Comey's cell phone," and an assistant reported the request in an email the next day. A Secret Service supervisor reportedly called the plan "legally questionable" but said the agency "might do it anyway." The filing says the Secret Service then submitted an emergency request to Verizon for Comey's location data without a warrant, and tracked him and his wife, Patrice, as they drove back to Virginia, including their stop to visit their son's grave.

Comey's lawyers say the surveillance happened the same day the Secret Service "instituted a new policy, effective immediately, to treat the phrase '8647' as coded language for threatening the President," according to CNBC. They also allege the Secret Service coordinated closely with the Department of Justice and the White House, sending "frequent updates to Air Force One" in response to Trump's direct requests for information before he spoke to the press about the post.

The filing claims the request for warrantless surveillance came from the "number three" official at the Department of Justice. The Guardian reported that Comey's lawyers also allege investigators turned to ChatGPT and consulted a mafia-linked figure while building the case, which they describe as having gone nowhere until Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle "reinvigorated" it.

Reason's reporting adds a data point: Amazon vendors sold more than 200,000 products featuring the phrase "86 47" or variations like "86 46" and "86 45" before Comey ever posted his photo. None of those sales, Comey's attorneys argue, triggered a federal threat investigation. They're using that fact to argue the prosecution is selective, singling out Comey for a phrase in wide circulation as ordinary political speech.

Comey's side points to a common anti-Trump internet meme, applied to a beach photo, becoming the basis for a federal felony charge carrying up to 10 years in prison, only after the president personally objected. Reason also notes Blanche pursued the case aggressively while seeking Senate confirmation as attorney general after Trump fired Pam Bondi on April 2.

The government's side of the story is thinner in the record so far. A Department of Justice spokesperson told MS NOW only that "a North Carolina grand jury indicted Comey, and he'll have his day in court like any other defendant." Federal prosecutors have not yet filed a public response addressing the specific surveillance allegations, according to Vesper. No court has ruled on the merits of the vindictive-prosecution claim, and the allegations in Comey's filing remain unproven assertions from one side of an adversarial case, not established fact.

A threat against a sitting president, even one framed as a joke, is not automatically protected speech, and prosecutors are entitled to investigate ambiguous conduct. Courts will have to sort out whether investigators had a good-faith basis to treat "8647" as a genuine threat, given how widely the phrase circulates as anti-Trump commentary, or whether the case was pursued specifically because of who posted it.

This isn't Comey's first indictment to run into trouble. A federal judge in Virginia last year threw out a separate case accusing Comey of lying to Congress, ruling that Lindsey Halligan, a former personal Trump attorney who obtained that indictment, had been unlawfully appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

A hearing on the motion to dismiss the North Carolina indictment is expected, with government lawyers anticipated to defend the investigation's conduct, according to Vesper. Until a judge rules, the surveillance allegations sit exactly where they are now: detailed, specific, sourced to internal Secret Service records and emails, and entirely untested in open court.