When a federal grand jury indicted former FBI Director James Comey last week, the story that dominated headlines was the infamous Instagram post — specifically, the image of seashells arranged to spell out "86 47," which prosecutors say a reasonable person familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of intent to harm President Donald Trump.
On Sunday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sat down with NBC's Kristen Welker on Meet the Press and made one thing abundantly clear: the seashells are just the beginning.
Welker came in swinging, asking Blanche how an image of seashells could amount to a serious threat against the president's life.
"Rest assured that the career assistant United States attorneys in North Carolina, the career FBI agents, the career secret service agents that investigated this case didn't just look at the Instagram post and walk away," Blanche said. "That's why you saw an indictment last week, notwithstanding the fact that it was last May that the post was made."
That 11-month gap may actually be the most telling detail in this whole story. Federal prosecutors don't spend nearly a year on a case built around a single social media photo. Blanche was careful, as he had to be, not to reveal what the grand jury heard. But he was equally careful to make sure that viewers understood there's a lot more they haven't heard yet.
And the grand jury felt there was enough.
Comey deleted the post the same day he put it up and offered the lame explanation that he didn’t realize that “86” was associated with violence. “It never occurred to me,” he claimed. “But I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down."
Blanche wasn't buying that excuse as some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. "You prove intent like you always prove intent," he said. "You prove intent with witnesses, you prove intent with documents, with materials."
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In the end, it was still the grand jury’s decision to indict.
"It's not the government. It's not the Department of Justice. It's not Todd Blanche that returned an indictment against James Comey," Blanche said. "It's the grand jury, part of the judicial process, and this process has to be allowed to play out in the courts."
The indictment drew scrutiny from conservative legal scholar Jonathan Turley, who called the indictment "facially unconstitutional, absent some unknown new facts," and Welker asked Blanche whether those unknown facts actually exist. He confirmed they do, again pointing to the timeline. "If the only facts that existed was the posting of the Instagram, obviously that wouldn't have taken 11 months," Blanche said. He added that prosecutors are "prepared" to prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.
𝐖𝐄𝐋𝐊𝐄𝐑 𝐀𝐒𝐊𝐄𝐃 𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓. 𝐁𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐇𝐄: “𝐋𝐈𝐊𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐀𝐋𝐖𝐀𝐘𝐒 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓.”
— M.A. Rothman (@MichaelARothman) May 3, 2026
On Meet the Press, NBC’s Kristen Welker tried to frame the Comey indictment around a single Instagram post and Comey’s after-the-fact claim that… pic.twitter.com/OxiDeeIxg7
In the end, the case represents months of work by career prosecutors and federal agents in North Carolina — it clearly gave a grand jury enough to act. The left may want us to believe this is about seashells and a misunderstood Instagram post, but there’s clearly more to it.
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