Seashells, Subpoenas and Spin: Todd Blanche Insists Comey Case Is Bigger Than One Beach Photo

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took to NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday with a tricky bit of homework: convince the watching public that prosecuting a former FBI director over an Instagram snap of seashells is, in fact, a perfectly normal use of federal resources.

Spoiler: host Kristen Welker was not having it.

What Blanche actually said

Pressed repeatedly on the indictment of James Comey, Blanche insisted the case was not just about a single Instagram post. He told Welker the prosecution was built on a wider pattern of conduct, although he was notably light on specifics about what that wider pattern actually looks like.

The post in question, for anyone who has wisely tuned out the past year of American political theatre, showed seashells arranged on a beach to spell out '86 47'. Comey captioned it 'Cool shell formation on my beach walk' on 15 May 2025, then deleted it after people pointed out the apparent meaning.

The seashell decoder ring

'86', per Merriam-Webster, is slang for getting rid of something. '47' refers to Donald Trump, the 47th US president. Stitch the two together and critics read it as a coded call to remove Trump from office. Comey's defenders read it as a bloke noticing some shells on his morning walk and posting about them like any other dad on Instagram.

Whichever camp you sit in, prosecutors clearly took the spicier interpretation. Roughly 11 months after the post, on 28 April 2026, a federal grand jury in North Carolina indicted Comey on two felony counts: threatening to kill or harm the president, and transmitting that threat publicly. The charges carry a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Why North Carolina, of all places?

This is the bit that politics nerds will find quietly fascinating. The first attempt to indict Comey, back in September 2025, was brought in Virginia and promptly tossed by a judge who ruled the US attorney there had been appointed illegally. Embarrassing.

Round two has shifted across state lines to the Eastern District of North Carolina. That looks less like a coincidence and more like a deliberate venue swerve to dodge the appointment problem that sank the original case. The Department of Justice gets a fresh court, a fresh jury pool, and crucially a fresh shot.

Blanche's awkward pedigree

It is worth pausing on who is fronting this prosecution. Todd Blanche was, until fairly recently, Trump's personal defence lawyer. He represented Trump in the New York hush-money trial. Now he is the acting attorney general, going after people Trump has publicly named as targets.

That is not a great look for any government claiming the prosecution is non-political. Blanche replaced Pam Bondi, who was reportedly pushed out of the role after failing to deliver convictions on Trump's wishlist. Bondi herself had been told via Truth Social that her boss wanted indictments against Comey, Adam Schiff and Letitia James. Subtle, the man is not.

Schiff's verdict

Speaking of Schiff, the senator and former House prosecutor turned up on the same Meet the Press episode and did not mince words. He said in his six years as a prosecutor he had 'never seen such a weak case'. Coming from someone who has himself been threatened with prosecution by this administration, you might say he has a dog in the fight. But the basic legal point still lands: building a credible threat-to-kill charge on a deleted beach photo is, to put it mildly, a stretch.

What about Jerome Powell?

Welker also pushed Blanche on the Federal Reserve chair, who confirmed at a 29 April press conference that he plans to stay on the Fed board until the investigation into him is wrapped up. The Independent reported that the DOJ ended a separate Powell investigation last month to lock in a key Senate Republican vote, although that particular claim has not been independently corroborated elsewhere, so treat it with appropriate scepticism.

Either way, Powell sticking around is a quiet act of institutional defiance. Central bankers do not usually make political statements. Saying out loud that you will not be hounded off the board is, in this climate, a statement.

Why UK readers should care

Fair question. Why does any of this matter on this side of the Atlantic?

• The US dollar, the Fed and American political stability all feed directly into UK mortgages, pensions and the cost of your weekly shop.
• The norm of independent prosecution is one of those quiet pillars that, when wobbled, tends to wobble globally. The UK has its own debates about prosecutorial independence, and what happens in Washington tends to seep into the conversation here.
• Comey, for all his flaws, is the man who ran the FBI investigation into Russian interference in 2016. Prosecuting him over an Instagram post is the sort of thing that gets noticed by every other democracy currently fending off accusations of political score-settling.

The bigger picture

Strip away the seashells and the soundbites and you are left with a familiar pattern. A president names enemies. An attorney general loses their job for not delivering convictions. A new acting AG, who used to be the president's lawyer, takes over and immediately secures the indictment. The venue conveniently shifts to dodge a previous legal problem.

Blanche can insist on Sunday morning television that the Comey case is about more than one Instagram post. The trouble is, the public has been shown precisely one Instagram post. If there is a wider pattern of threatening conduct, prosecutors will need to put it in front of a jury in North Carolina, not just hint at it on NBC.

The verdict from this side of the pond

This case will rise or fall on whether a jury believes a deleted photo of beach shells constitutes a credible threat to kill the president. That is a high bar, and rightly so. Anything less and the First Amendment starts looking distinctly threadbare.

For now, treat Blanche's 'wider pattern' line with the same energy you would treat a politician promising 'more details to follow'. Possible. Plausible? We will see.

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