Conservative legal commentator and Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy shredded Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche over his defense of the Department of Justice’s case against former FBI director James Comey in a new column for National Review.

Comey was indicted last week over a 2025 Instagram post including a picture of seashells arranged on the beach to read, “86 47,” and the caption, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” Prosecutors are arguing the post constituted “a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States.”

McCarthy wrote on Saturday submitted that “On the Sunday news shows last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche attempted the impossible: an explanation, besides politicized prosecution, for why the Trump Justice Department has charged only his boss’s nemesis, James Comey, with a criminally actionable threat for using the term ’86’ in connection with a president.”

He continued:

Nobody doubts that “47” refers to Trump, the 47th president of these United States. The question is what “86” means.

On that score, Blanche is flailing. The term, as we shall see, is ambiguous and most commonly understood to be non-violent. Countless others continue to go un-charged for the same conduct, including MAGA fave Jack Posobiec, who posted “86 46” in a 2022 post, referring to then–President Joe Biden.

The New York Times reports on Blanche’s Meet the Press interview:

“Of course the seashells are part of that case,” said Mr. Blanche, who acknowledged that proving Mr. Comey’s intent would be crucial to his prosecution. “You prove intent with witnesses; you prove intent with documents,” he said, adding that there was “a body of evidence” that led to Mr. Comey’s indictment.

The acting AG’s analysis is specious. As a matter of law, Comey’s communication was not an actionable threat. His intent is therefore beside the point.

“Sure, Comey plainly did not intend to threaten bodily harm. More fundamentally, though, even if Comey’s state of mind had been sinister, he’d still be innocent because the seashell array was not an actionable threat,” argued McCarthy, who concluded:

Blanche claims that the seashell array is just a portion of the government’s proof, and intimates that he has scads of evidence — undisclosed, of course — about Comey’s allegedly violent intent. But the indictment only refers to the seashell array; that’s the supposed threat crime. In nearly 20 years as a federal prosecutor, I wrote or approved hundreds of indictments. When prosecutors have boffo evidence, they find ways to allude to it in the written charges so that it will be highlighted when the jury deliberates. There is no hint of that in the indictment against Comey.

Perhaps that’s because there is no such evidence; after all, the publicly known indications are that Comey opposes unlawful violence, and political violence specifically. Maybe, though, it’s because Blanche knows Comey’s state of mind is a second-order concern: If prosecutors don’t have a true threat, they don’t have a case, no matter what Comey intended by the seashell array. And “86 47” is not a true threat.

McCarthy was also critical of the case brought against Comey last fall, which was later dismissed, but has characterized this second indictment as “even more absurd than the previous.”

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