Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is pleasing President Donald Trump by supporting a ridiculous indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a benign photo.

Maybe Blanche thinks this foolishness will prevent him from being 86ed like Pam Bondi was, but even she didn’t try to sell a case of some seashells by the seashore. Blanche is debasing himself and the law in this shameful pursuit.

The Justice Department under Bondi went after Comey months ago, but that collapsed when a federal judge ruled that the supposed U.S. attorney who brought it wasn’t even legally serving in her role.

That first indictment was centered around Comey’s supposed false statements to Congress, but this one is truly dumb: it is based on Comey’s posting to Instagram of a photo of seashells on the seashore that he came across while vacationing. Yes, really.

Usually, we would have to explain in some technical detail why something that the Trump DOJ is doing might be unprecedented or dangerous, but here the facts themselves are so obviously absurd that we imagine anyone could intuitively grasp that this is not a real indictment even under the most intense mental gymnastics.

The DOJ’s actual legal theory is that Comey’s picture of seashells arranged to read “86 47” was not only a direct threat to the safety of the president but an actionable and immediate enough threat to constitute a criminal offense.

The gunman who stormed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a real threat to the president. The shells are a joke, and meant to a one

The shells only spelled out some digits, they did not spell out any plan to harm Trump. The message was “Dump Trump.” That is not a crime nor an incitement to a crime.

On that note, references to “86 46” abounded during Joe Biden’s term. Right wing provocateur Jack Posobiec in 2022 posted that exact message on Twitter, though he was never indicted because that would of course have been ridiculous. To this day, merchandise like T-shirts are sold on Amazon and elsewhere featuring the “86 46” message, and of course no one has taken that as any kind of threat to the former president’s life.

Under this theory, you might as well be arrested the next time you exasperatedly mutter “ugh, I’m gonna kill you” about someone being annoying.

Of course, this is all engaging with the indictment at face value, but no one outside or inside the DOJ actually believes that this was the result of a real threat against the president. It is simply a hook for the department to keep trying to punish Comey for the crime of having pushed back on Trump’s illegality during Trump’s first term and speaking out publicly against the president’s authoritarian tendencies. Trump doesn’t realize that this campaign is only proving Comey’s point, but that doesn’t make it any less damaging to our rule of law.

Like every politically-motivated prosecution that the administration has tried to bring thus far, we expect this will fall apart under the slightest scrutiny, and hopefully a federal judge will at the very least press DOJ lawyers to discuss how this prosecution was brought. Did they question the shells about a possible dastardly plot?

Still, even eventual failure of the shell case doesn’t mean that it has no effect; these prosecutions have weaponized the awesome powers of our federal law enforcement and waste resources and intimidate and chill opponents even when they go nowhere. They must stop, and those that are bringing them must themselves face real consequences.

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