Did the Rockport County Sheriff say he would ask a grand jury to indict former FBI director James Comey on state terroristic threats charges? No, that's not true: A meme making that claim originated on a Facebook page with a satire disclaimer. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content. Also, there is no Rockport County in the United States.
The meme appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on the page "America's Last Line of Defense" on May 17, 2025 with a caption that read "His little code for 'harm the president' is going to cost him." The meme read:
The Sheriff of Rockport County will ask a grand jury to indict James Comey on state charges of issuing terroristic threats.
We don't need to wait for the feds to bring charges. He did this in our state.'
Comey made a huge mistake.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Jun 4 20:54:31 2025 UTC)
The meme is an obvious reference to calls for criminal charges against Comey that followed his posting on social media of a photo of seashells on a beach, that spelled out "8647." The claim was that it was a coded threat to harm (86) President Trump (the 47th president).
An obvious clue that the claim is fake is the purported jurisdiction of the sheriff. A Google search confirmed there is no Rockport County in the United States.
According to the page transparency tab of the Facebook page that published the meme, it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who, for years, has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers, and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images, or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustrations. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites Lead Stories debunked over the years.
