James Comey loves the beach.

Also: He used to be the director of the FBI.

Also! This week, he was charged with threatening to kill the president because he took a picture on the beach. So, um, what kind of beach picture is so bad that it got a former FBI director indicted for a serious federal crime? From CNN:

The caption on that post, by the way, was “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

This sent shivers up the spines of people who are easily outraged, and their uproar led Comey to delete it hours later and issue a Notes app statement. Nearly a year went by before charges were filed. Despite being accused of threatening the life of the president, the courts don’t think Comey poses much of a threat to the public. During his initial court hearing on Wednesday, when asked whether there should be any conditions on his release, the judge said: “I don’t see why they’d be necessary this time.”

Now look. I’m going to give you my normal disclaimer that my angle here is not the most important angle on this story, which, like many Trump-era stories, is simultaneously terrifying and dumb. I’m also not going to dive into the shell angle, which was heartily and studiously dissected by a scientist who calls himself Dan the Clam Man and has a blog called “Clamsplaining.”

No! My focus, which you will not be surprised to hear, is this: What beach, exactly, did this shell picture come from? Comey himself hasn’t said, nor have prosecutors. We do know it came from North Carolina, which has roughly 300 miles worth of coastline. If federal prosecutors are out here worried about ocean debris arranged into ominous numerical messages, then it might be useful for seashell- and cryptography-fearing folks to know what stretches of sand to avoid. Likewise, Dan Brown would probably like to visit this place to gain inspiration for his next Robert Langdon novel. I want to help everyone, you see.

Unfortunately, the extremely barebones indictment contains no specifics, other than the fact that it was filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina’s Eastern Division, which does not cover the Outer Banks or Wilmington. The only coastline counties in the Eastern Division are Hyde (which contains Ocracoke Island) and Carteret (home to the Crystal Coast and Cape Lookout). Ocracoke is fantastic but notably hard to get to, since you can only fly in or arrive by ferry. Same for Cape Lookout and the Shackleford Banks (if a wild horse arranged the seashells, then this should really be a story about the power of hoofwriting). That, plausibly, leaves a stretch of barrier island that protects Beaufort and Morehead City.

For this next part, let’s look at James Comey’s online presence. Back before he got fired as FBI director, he had no easily identifiable accounts on social media. That is, until the journalist Ashley Feinberg used all sorts of context clues to find Comey’s secret Twitter account, which he later confirmed was his. (NOTE: If you are a powerful government official, do not publicly allude to your burner social media account unless you want Ashley to find it. She did the same thing to Mitt Romney.) After Comey’s ouster, he became a bonafide poster. Some of his stuff is cryptically clever. Other posts are fairly straightforward. Comey has a new career as a crime novelist, and a big part of his online presence centers on telling people about his latest book. He’s also launched a Substack, where he delivers straight-to-camera monologues about the rule of law and his troubles with the Trump administration (If you’re scoring at home, Comey was indicted in another case last year that was thrown out). It all veers between serious and whimsical, but is generally non-threatening for a man who used to run a large federal law enforcement agency.

He also posts beach pictures. A lot. Most are non-descript, and he’s only included a beach location once (during a 2020 trip to Nags Head). I get it! He was the former FBI director! He probably knows there’s value in turning off location services on your favorite apps. He’s not loosey-goosey with his whereabouts on other social accounts either. For example, there’s a Jim Comey account and a James Comey account on Strava. They may not actually be him, and they’ve never posted anyway (again, good op sec, which can’t be said for a French sailor who logged his run at sea and accidentally revealed the location of his aircraft carrier).

In fact, my best lead here came from—I swear I am not making this up—a David Sedaris book. In 2018, he released Calypso, a collection of short semi-autobiographical essays. Part of the book talks about Sedaris’s purchase of a beach home on Emerald Isle, where he and his siblings spend time with their aging dad. One of the later chapters is called “The Comey Memo,” and details their excitement when they find out that James Comey himself is vacationing at a house just a block or two away from them:

They never actually saw Comey, who Sedaris describes as “this former director of the FBI whom we all hated until someone we hated more fired him.”

A few years later,the Comeys came back:

See that pier way back there? That’s the Bogue Inlet Fishing Pier in Emerald Isle. The tiny green ice cream shop and the bar in the top right corner give it away.

I know what you’re saying. Sure, James Comey has gone to Emerald Isle (birthplace of the Shibumi Shade!) in the PAST. Who’s to say he went there last May?

Well, about that. There’s been some discourse and rumor online that Comey and his wife own a home there. People have posted pictures of what they think is his house. I’m not going to link to those posts because they’re, um, politically motivated. Many of them question how a public servant could afford such a large home (ignoring the fact that Comey was a corporate lawyer for eight years before becoming FBI director in 2013, and disclosed a net worth of more than $10 million during his confirmation). But! I can confirm that a company that’s connected to other Comey properties did buy an old oceanfront duplex back in 2021. That duplex was torn down and a new home rose up in its place. It seems to have been finished for two or three years now, according to Google Street View.

Allow me to get wonky for a moment. An online search for “Comey” in Carteret County property records comes up empty. But there are plenty of beach homes that don’t have their owners’ actual names listed on public records. Many of them are in the name of trusts, realty companies, corporations, or limited liability companies. In Emerald Isle, one house is owned by a company that also is listed as the owner of Comey’s home in Northern Virginia. That company was formed in Delaware, long a haven for opaqueness in corporate records, not long before Comey’s house in Virginia was built. (I was able to confirm Comey’s Virginia address using roughly the same method that the Associated Press used to find his home in 2017, shortly after Trump fired him.) The company’s address is now listed as a mailbox at a UPS store in Northern Virginia, and owns Comey’s house up there and a house down here. I can’t 100% confirm it, but I’m extremely confident in saying that it’s his beach house, and at least one other news outlet has said the same thing.

(Note: I have used this particular comparison method once before to figure out that Charlotte megachurch pastor Steven Furtick was building a 16,000-square-foot-house in 2013, which Furtick later confirmed by saying “It’s not that great of a house!”)

(Sorry, one more note: I’m being rather cryptic here about exact locations because one thing you shouldn’t do is go up to what you think is James Comey’s house and try to peer inside. Don’t be like David Sedaris! At least not in this one specific way!)

So was James Comey vacationing there last May? Or did he go to some other beach? Well, again, I can’t say for certain. But as someone whose in-laws have a place at the beach, I can tell you that over the last ten years, we haven’t taken an in-state beach vacation anywhere else. Why? Because we’d have to pay more for it! If I went to all of the trouble to build a fairly new beach house, I don’t know that I’d be renting a different house somewhere else on the same island.

I did a little reporting to see if, in fact, Comey was a repeat visitor, so I got one fairly plugged-in person in Emerald Isle on the phone. That person called the Comeys friends and “nice people,” but understandably did not want to talk about this particular case. That said, several folks in town know the Comeys. That’d be far less likely if they weren’t vacationing there quite a bit.

So if the shells and the picture came from Emerald Isle, then where exactly? It’d be easy to assume that he took the picture in front of his house, but in an interview last year with “The Bulwark Podcast,” Comey added a little more detail. He and his wife were on a walk on a Thursday afternoon “across a big piece of beach,” when they saw the shells (near the road, he later told MSNBC). At first, they thought it was part of someone’s address before realizing it was political message and and took a picture. The spot was at “the point area of a barrier island. That's a gigantic collection of sand. It wasn’t crowded.” It’s possible that the Comeys could have driven out to Fort Macon on the eastern tip of the island, about 20 minutes away. Or they could have taken a day trip out to Cape Lookout or Shackleford Banks. But the western tip of Emerald Isle is much closer if you’re just out for an afternoon walk. It’s right next to the Bogue Inlet, which deposits a huge amount of sand and shells (and occasionally megalodon teeth).

The Point, as it’s called, would ostensibly be less crowded. Hence, nobody noticed Comey, who is 6’8” tall and is not someone who blends in. “People at the beach seem to focus on the things they should focus on, the water, the waves, their families. They're not looking,” he said. “I'm hardly a celeb, but they're not looking for celebs.”

Someday, if the prosecutors ever actually try this case, they might release the metadata on Comey’s picture and tell us exactly where it came from. But for now, I’d be willing to bet that it was taken on the afternoon of May 15, 2025, on the western tip of Emerald Isle, maybe not all that far from where Comey discovered another unusual shell a year earlier:

So. Through a combination of public records, publicly available information, social media posts, and interviews, we likely know where the picture was taken. But we still don’t know WHO arranged the shells. Comey says it wasn’t him or his wife—they merely discovered them and took a picture (hey, we’re all journalists now!) I’ve scoured Instagram for pictures taken in the area last May, but have come up empty. However! If you also found the same numbers, or have an information about the seashell resistance messages that keep turning up on Emerald Isle, you can reach me privately via Signal (my username is jeremymarkovich.11). I know we like to joke around here, but democracy is no shell game. Well, not usually, anyway.