Trump Indicts James Comey for a Second Time

Some accused the former FBI director of calling to “86,” or kill, the forty-seventh president, Donald Trump. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the government had indicted Comey in relation to the post. It was not immediately clear what the specific charges were. At the time, the Secret Service tracked Comey down on vacation with his family. He deleted the post and apologized. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said last year. Kristi Noem, then-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard both called for Comey to be jailed. Speaking to Fox News in May, Trump dismissed Comey’s apology: “He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant.”The government’s first indictment of Comey for allegedly giving false testimony and obstructing a probe about the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election quickly fell apart at the seams last year.The seemingly flimsy case was initially plagued by warnings from prosecutors that there wasn’t enough evidence to indict Comey in the first place, and concerns around how evidence had been handled. Eventually, a judge ruled that U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan had been improperly appointed, and the indictments she’d signed for Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were subsequently voided. This story has been updated.