‘This is something that has been investigated for nearly a year now,’ he said on Wednesday.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on April 29 said that President Donald Trump did not order the Department of Justice (DOJ) to file more charges against former FBI Director James Comey over a social media post that he made last year.
“Of course not, absolutely, positively not,” Blanche told “CBS Mornings” when he asked whether the president directed him to pursue new charges against Comey. “This is something that has been investigated for nearly a year now, and the results of that investigation is that a grand jury returned an indictment.”
On Tuesday, a grand jury returned an indictment against Comey over an Instagram post he made in May 2025 with a photo of seashells arranged on a beach to say “86 47.” Federal prosecutors said it was a threat to assassinate Trump. Comey later deleted the post and said that he thought the sell arrangement was a political message, not a call to violence.
“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence,” and “I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” Comey wrote at the time.
The criminal case is the second in months against Comey. A separate and unrelated indictment against the former FBI director was dismissed in late 2025 after a court ruled that the U.S. attorney who brought the charges was appointed in an unlawful manner.
Prosecutors said in a news release Tuesday of the new charge that it was a message that a “reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”
Comey was charged with threatening the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. He could face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, according to the Department of Justice.
“If anybody in this country thinks—especially given what happened over the past couple of years with respect to President Trump—that it is okay for anybody to threaten the president of the United States … and then have the media or others say, well that’s not serious, then we have a bigger problem than I even imagined in this country,” Blanche told CBS on April 29.
The acting attorney general added that “anybody who tries to put forward some narrative that this is just about seashells or something to the contrary is missing the point,” stressing, “You cannot threaten the president of the United States.”
