What happened
The Justice Department yesterday indicted former FBI Director James Comey again, this time over a photo he posted last May showing seashells spelling out “86 47.” By posting 86 — a common term for ejecting unruly patrons from bars — and 47, the number of Donald Trump’s presidency, Comey (pictured above) “knowingly and willfully” threatened to “take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the president,” the two-count indictment said. The DOJ’s attempt to prosecute Comey last year for allegedly lying to Congress was thrown out by a judge.

Who said what
The charges are the “latest salvo” in the DOJ’s “tortured efforts to satisfy” Trump’s demands to “go after longtime targets of his wrath,” The New York Times said. Comey posted, then deleted, the beach photo “nearly a year ago,” The Associated Press said, but the indictment was secured as acting Attorney General Todd Blanche “aims to prove to the president that he is the right person to hold the job permanently.” 

“Well, they’re back,” Comey said in a video statement yesterday. “I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid. … So let’s go.”

What next?
Prosecuting Comey for his seashell post “may be fruitless,” said CNN. “Especially given the country’s free speech protections.” 

What happened
The United Arab Emirates yesterday said it was withdrawing from OPEC and Russian-led OPEC+ on Friday, weakening the oil cartel’s leverage to set and stabilize oil prices. The UAE, which joined OPEC in 1967, is the cartel’s third-biggest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Iran. 

Who said what
The UAE’s exit “had been rumored as a possibility for some time, as it pushed back in recent years” against production limits enforced by OPEC  to influence oil prices, The Associated Press said. In the short term, the decision “doesn’t really matter,” Semafor’s Matthew Martin said. “With the Strait of Hormuz closed, Gulf oil producers can’t hit their production targets anyway.” But “in the long term,” The New York Times said, the UAE’s move “could contribute to greater volatility” in the oil markets.

What next?
Free from the cartel’s “rigid quotas,” the UAE “gains the flexibility to aggressively increase its oil production on its own terms,” The Wall Street Journal said. Its departure could “spur more defections” from other members who have similarly “chafed at Saudi Arabia’s dominance.” This is “the beginning of the end of OPEC,” MST Financial energy analyst Saul Kavonic told the BBC.

Amid the Trump administration’s ramped-up ICE raids and mass deportations, some immigrants are falling victim to fraudsters targeting vulnerable migrant communities. Many of the scammed immigrants, including those who are in the U.S. legally, say they’ve lost thousands of dollars.

Legal organizations and immigrant rights groups “have warned that scams targeting immigrants and attorneys have increased to an alarming level,” said Mother Jones. The exact schemes vary, but many of these fraudsters “adopt the name of a reputable law office” and “advertise themselves on Facebook as law firms.”

The scammers then coerce their victims into handing over large sums of money in exchange for purported legal advice. At least “six immigrants in five states — Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New York and Washington — lost between $1,300 and $11,000 to criminal networks operating on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp,” said NBC News. 

Some officials are working to curtail these scammers. Most notably, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sent a letter to Meta, the parent company of Facebook, asking them to crack down on the schemes. Among the ways that experts say immigrants can protect themselves, a major step is to verify that the person in question is a licensed attorney.

The scams “hurt the rule of law. It hurts our standing as a system of justice,” Charity Anastasio, a counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Mother Jones. The legal system is “under enough attack now already. We really don’t need this added criminal element.”