Acting attorney general claims Comey ‘threatened the life of the president’ in announcing charges
At a news conference on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the former defense lawyer for Donald Trump now serving as acting US attorney general, just announced the filing of two charges against James Comey, the former FBI director and deputy attorney general for allegedly “knowing and willfully making a threat to kill” the president of the United States in a social media post.
The two-page indictment filed in North Carolina claimed Comey “did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States, in that he publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ‘86 47’ which 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.”
The number 86 can be used as shorthand for getting rid of something, and Trump is the 47th president. Comey subsequently deleted the post and apologized, saying he didn’t realize the numbers were associated with violence. “It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he wrote on Instagram.
Blanche noted that an arrest warrant had been issued but did not know if Comey had been arrested yet.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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Todd Blanche, the former defense lawyer for Donald Trump now serving as acting US attorney general, announced two charges against James Comey, the former FBI director and deputy attorney general for allegedly “knowing and willfully making a threat to kill” the president of the United States in a social media post.
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Patrick Fitzgerald, a former US attorney for the northern district of Illinois who now represents James Comey, said that his client, “vigorously denies the charges” filed against him.
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Democrats on the House judiciary committee responded to news of the indictment by asking if charges would soon be brought against Trump for threatening them.
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King Charles and Queen Camilla returned to the White House for a state dinner hosted by Donald and Melania Trump. It was far from the first such event attended by Charles.
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The state dinner at the White House was probably awkward for UK ambassador Sir Christian Turner, who reportedly said America’s only “special relationship” is “probably Israel”, not the UK, and that it was “extraordinary” that the scandal over the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “hasn’t touched anybody” in the US.
Lauren Gambino
Eight candidates vying to replace the term-limited California governor, Gavin Newsom, clashed on Tuesday night as they scrambled to break out in a race that remains up for grabs.
The 90-minute debate, held at Pomona College and hosted by CBS News, was the second chance in as many weeks for the candidates to distinguish themselves, with more than a quarter of voters remain undecided less than a week before ballots are mailed out.
“Wow, that was a bit of a mess,” said a political science student who asked the candidates about their plans to make college more affordable.
In an unusual format, the moderator for the second segment cut in multiple times, speaking over the candidates and challenging them in real time. At one point, she warned former LA mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, one of the Democratic hopefuls, that she would ban the candidates from invoking the president’s name if “I hear it too many times”.
Questions on whether to suspend the gas tax, how to address the insurance crisis, and homelessness, helped draw out the ideological division between the six Democrats – billionaire Tom Steyer, former health secretary Xavier Becerra, former congresswoman Katie Porter and Villaraigosa, San Jose mayor, Matt Mahan and California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond – and two Republicans – Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host and director of strategy to former UK prime minister David Cameron, and Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside county.
As the debate neared its end, the candidates began to jab one another more sharply. Mahan assailed Becerra over his record as Joe Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, while Porter criticized Steyer for his wealth and past investments. At another point, the crowd applauded when Thurmond blasted Bianco for his seizure of more than half a million ballots.
Britain’s ambassador to US attends state dinner after saying America’s only ‘special relationship’ is ‘probably Israel’, not the UK
The state dinner at the White House was probably somewhat awkward for at least one guest, Sir Christian Turner, who was reported on Tuesday to have said in February that America’s only “special relationship” is “probably Israel”, not the UK, and that it was “extraordinary” that the scandal over the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “hasn’t touched anybody” in the US.
According to the Financial Times, which obtained audio of the remarks this week, Turner made the comments in February at an event with UK students visiting Washington DC.
“I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States — and that is probably Israel,” Turner told the students.
Turner, who arrived in February to replace Peter Mandelson, after Mandelson’s close friendship with Epstein was revealed in greater detail, also said it was “extraordinary” to him that the scandal over Epstein’s powerful associates had “brought down a senior member of the royal family, a British ambassador to Washington, potentially the prime minister, and yet here in the US, it really hasn’t touched anybody”. He added that this fact raised an “interesting question” about the “different levels of accountability in our systems”.
Epstein was closely linked to Donald Trump, since the two men socialized together for nearly two decades, from the 1980s through the early 2000s. One of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, Virginia Robert Giuffre, who died last year, said in a legal complaint that she was hired away from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa by Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000, when she was 16. Giuffre also alleged in her complaint that she was first abused by Epstein and Maxwell together, and then “lent out to other powerful men”, including Prince Andrew, the brother of King Charles.
After the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had sent Epstein a bawdy drawing and note for his 50th birthday in 2003, which the president insisted in a lawsuit was both fake and did not exist, the late sex offender’s estate provided the entire bound album of birthday greetings from Epstein’s friends and associates. It included not just Trump’s note, but also a lengthy, gushing letter from Mandelson.
Trump smiles awkwardly as King Charles seems to compare US-UK tensions during Suez crisis to current
As he read the remarks prepared for him at the state dinner at the White House, King Charles argued for the importance of the partnership between the United Kingdom and the United States while gingerly noting the current tensions between the two countries.
At one point, after listing challenges facing the two nations, including “threats to the very international rules that have allowed us to trade”, the monarch said “those challenges encourage us to reaffirm tonight the basis on which our partnership has been built.”
“And yes, we have had our moments of difficulty, even in more recent history,” he continued. “When my mother visited in 1957, not the least of her tasks was to help put the special back into our relationship after a crisis in the Middle East. Nearly 70 years on, it is hard to imagine anything like that happening today.”
A ripple of laughter greeted that last comment, a clear reference to the fact that while, in the 1956 Suez crisis, it had been the US that refused to back aggression against Egypt by Britain, France and Israel, causing a rift, this year it has been the UK that refused to give full support to a war of aggression against Iran launched by the US and Israel.
Trump hails British colonialism in speech at state dinner for King Charles
Donald Trump offered a full-throated defense of Britain’s colonial exploitation of a large swath of the globe in his remarks at a state dinner on Tuesday in honor of King Charles, whose five-times great grandfather King George III was described in the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago as a ruler who aimed to establish “an absolute Tyranny over these States”.
“Today, most of Britain’s former colonies have no idea what they truly owe to this towering legacy of law, liberty, and British custom that they were given—we were given that and it was a great, great gift,” the president said.
King Charles returns to the White House again to dine with Trump
King Charles and Queen Camilla have returned to the White House for a state dinner hosted by Donald and Melania Trump.
Although King Charles is two years younger than Trump, he has been coming to the White House for decades, in the company of multiple presidents.
As the White House chief photo editor Patrick Witty pointed out on social media, the White House archives include a photograph of a young Prince Charles in a far less gold-encrusted Oval Office with Richard Nixon on 1970.
In 1985, Charles was photographed speaking with then first lay Nancy Reagan as his first wife, Princess Diana, danced with John Travolta.
Twenty years later, when Charles returned with his second wife, Camilla, for a November 2005 dinner hosted by George W Bush, a wire service photograph noted that “memories of the late Princess Diana are still strong” in Washington DC.
Charles shared a laugh with the then president’s father, former president George H W Bush, during his toast at that dinner.
A decade after that, Charles and Camilla visited Barack Obama in the Oval Office in 2015.
Indictment of Comey comes a decade after Trump threatened to jail Hillary Clinton over her emails
The indictment of James Comey on Tuesday for allegedly threatening the life of Donald Trump with an arrangement of seashells, seen by many as the final nail in the coffin of a formerly independent Department of Justice, comes nearly a decade after Trump threatened, in a 2016 debate, to have Hillary Clinton jailed over her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
During that debate, just two days after the Access Hollywood recording of Trump boasting about groping women was revealed, Trump threatened Clinton after she criticized him for those comments and for refusing to apologize for “the racist lie that President Obama was not born in the United States of America”.
“When you talk about apology, I think the one that you should really be apologizing… and the thing that you should be apologizing for are the 33,000 e-mails that you deleted,” Trump said heatedly.
“I didn’t think I’d say this, but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it.,” he added. “But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it.”
He then claimed that career FBI officials were “furious” that the then FBI director, Comey, had decided that criminal charges against Clinton, for her “extremely careless” handling of classified information in her emails, were not warranted.
In response, Clinton first said, “everything he just said is absolutely false” and then advised debate viewers to “go to HillaryClinton.com” for fact-checking of Trump. She then concluded: “it’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.”
“Because you’d be in jail,” Trump shot back, to a mix of shock, cheers and applause from the audience.
Joseph Gedeon
The United States government, marking 250 years of independence from a monarchy, will this summer issue passports featuring a large photograph of its most senior leader’s face.
The limited-edition documents, billed as a commemoration of the US’s 250th anniversary of independence, will display Donald Trump’s photograph on the inside cover, surrounded by the text of the Declaration of Independence and the US flag, with his signature rendered in gold. A separate page features the famous painting of the founding fathers signing that very document.
The passport is just the latest in Trump’s effort to plaster his face across US institutions and documents. A banner of the president’s face already graces the Department of Justice building in Washington, along with others hanging on the Department of Labor and the Department of Agriculture, where it is featured alongside Abraham Lincoln beneath the words “Growing America Since 1862”.
The national parks pass for 2026 also features Trump’s face, with George Washington’s, under the word’s “America the beautiful”. After visitors began covering his image with stickers in protest, the National Park Service updated its policy to warn that altering the pass in any way could render it invalid.
The US Mint, meanwhile, has published draft designs for a $1 coin bearing Trump’s likeness, and the commission of fine arts this year approved a design for a commemorative 24-karat gold coin featuring a stern-faced Trump leaning over a desk.
Comey’s lawyer, Patrick Fitzgerald, says his team looks forward to vindicating him ‘and the First Amendment’
In a short statement, Patrick Fitzgerald, a former US attorney for the northern district of Illinois who now represents James Comey, said that his client, “vigorously denies the charges” filed against him on Tuesday in federal court over a social media image of seashells on a beach that prosecutors claim was a threat to the life of the president, Donald Trump.
“We will contest these charges in the courtroom and look forward to vindicating Mr. Comey and the First Amendment,” Fitzgerald said.
In 2003, Comey, then the deputy attorney general, appointed Fitzgerald as a special prosecutor to investigate whether George W Bush administration officials had illegally disclosed the identity of an undercover CIA officer, Valerie Plame, to punish her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, for revealing in an opinion piece that he had gone to Niger in 2002 and found no evidence to substantiate the calim made by Bush that Iraq had imported uranium ore from Africa.
Fitzgerald won a conviction against then vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby for perjury, lying to investigators and obstruction of justice.
In 2018, Trump pardoned Libby, reportedly at the suggestion of one of Libby’s friends, Victoria Toensing, whose husband and law partner, Joseph diGenova, later worked with Rudy Giuliani to find, or create, damaging information about Joe Biden’s role in Ukraine on behalf of Trump.
Last week, diGenova, who is now 81, was sworn in to a special role at the Department of Justice, to investigate what Trump allies claims was a “grand conspiracy” to violate Trump’s constitutional rights. According to the theory, which diGenova has endorsed, a sprawling plot against Trump started with the investigation into Russian efforts to aid the 2016 Trump campaign, and included special counsel Jack’s Smith’s indictments of Trump for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election and then illegally retaining classified documents.
House Democrats ask if Trump will be indicted next for suggesting his political opponents should die
Democrats on the House judiciary committee responded to news of the indictment of James Comey on criminal charges, for a social media post of seashells arranged in an “86 47” pattern, a reference to restaurant slang for removing a dish from a menu, by asking if charges would soon be brought against Donald Trump for posting threats against them.
In a statement posted on social media, the Democrats, led by Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, a former constitutional law scholar, drew attention to two statements from Trump threatening violence against his political opponents:
Trump’s DOJ just criminally indicted James Comey for a beach photo of seashells and no other evidence cited. If that’s a crime in America, then what is:
-calling the free speech of six Democratic Members of Congress “seditious behavior, punishable by DEATH”?
-suggesting a former Republican Member of Congress should have to “face nine barrels shooting at her” with “the guns trained on her face”?
Todd Blanche just said the beach-shell conspiracy “is the kind of conduct we will NEVER tolerate and we will ALWAYS investigate and prosecute.” Can we therefore expect investigations and prosecutions of these threats?
The two Trump statements referred to by the Democratic lawmakers were: a November 2025 social media post, in which he suggested that six Democratic lawmakers could be executed for a social media video informing service members that they can disobey illegal orders; and a comment Trump made in October 2024 about Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman who helped lead an investigation of his failed effort to stay in office after losing the 2020 election.
Schiff says Blanche brought ‘frivolous’ charges against Comey to get appointed attorney general by Trump
In a video response to the indictment of James Comey, senator Adam Schiff, a former prosecutor who led the first impeachment of Donald Trump, accused Todd Blanche of bringing charges as part of an effort to get the job of attorney general on a permanent basis.
Blanche announced criminal charges against Comey, Schiff said, “because of seashells on the beach which he posted an image of that said, ‘86 47’, 86 being slang for getting rid of something and 47 being the number of the 47th president, Donald Trump.”
“It is an absurdity to charge someone for this,” Schiff added.
Schiff predicted that this second effort to convict Comey of a crime “will also fail, but this has, I guess, the merit, from the White House point of view of just putting James Comey through the wringer, and from Todd Blanche’s point of view, helping burnish his record of frivolous cases against the president’s enemies in order to secure the top job for himself.”
Comey expresses faith that he will be exonerated at trial over social media post: ‘So, let’s go.’
In a video statement posted on Substack, James Comey, the former FBI director and deputy attorney general, responded to new criminal charges alleging that his social media post last year, with seashells arranged in an “86 47” pattern on a beach constituted an illegal threat to the life of Donald Trump.
In a post headlined “Seashells”, Comey said:
Well, they’re back. This time, about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won’t be the end of it, but nothing has changed with me. I am still innocent. I am still not afraid. And I still believe in the independent federal judiciary – so, let’s go. But it’s really important that all of us remember: this is not who we are as a country, this is not how the department of justice is supposed to be, and the good news is we get closer every day to restoring those values. Keep the faith.
Daily Wire reporter reminds attorney general Gretchen Whitmer displayed ’86 45′ image in 2020
At the end of the Department of Justice news conference to announce the filing of criminal charges against the former FBI director, James Comey, for posting an Instagram image of seashells arranged on the beach in an “86 47” pattern, taken as a threat to the life of the 47th president, Donald Trump, a reporter for a rightwing, pro-Trump outlet asked if similar charges might now follow for another critic of the president, Gretchen Whitmer.
Mary Margaret Olohan, a Daily Wire correspondent, asked Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer now serving as acting attorney general, if, according to the logic of the indictment against Comey, similar charges might soon be filed against Whitmer, the Michigan governor, over a small “86 45” pin seen on a table behind her during a 2020 TV interview with NBC news.
The interview with Whitmer was conducted weeks before the 2020 election and the Trump campaign claimed that the small pin, used by opponents of Trump to signal that they were in favor of voting him out of office, somehow meant that the governor was “encouraging assassination attempts against President Trump”, who was at that time the 45th president.
As Michigan Public Radio explained at the time, anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant has “most likely heard the term ‘86’ yelled at you from the kitchen. In the restaurant industry, the term is used to refer to dishes that are no longer available on the menu.”
As critics of the logic under which Comey was indicted have pointed out, if posting that slogan is a criminal threat to the life of the president, then the justice department should soon also be filing charges against Jack Posobiec, the rightwing Turning Point USA operative and podcaster who posted “86 46” on Twitter in early 2022, when Joe Biden was the 46th president.
In the news conference, Blanche refused to be drawn on the question of charges against Whitmer, but he also pointed out, in response to another question, that “the statute of limitations on this is five years”, which would seem to rule out charges against Whitmer, but not against Posobiec.
Acting attorney general claims Comey ‘threatened the life of the president’ in announcing charges
At a news conference on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the former defense lawyer for Donald Trump now serving as acting US attorney general, just announced the filing of two charges against James Comey, the former FBI director and deputy attorney general for allegedly “knowing and willfully making a threat to kill” the president of the United States in a social media post.
The two-page indictment filed in North Carolina claimed Comey “did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States, in that he publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ‘86 47’ which 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.”
The number 86 can be used as shorthand for getting rid of something, and Trump is the 47th president. Comey subsequently deleted the post and apologized, saying he didn’t realize the numbers were associated with violence. “It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he wrote on Instagram.
Blanche noted that an arrest warrant had been issued but did not know if Comey had been arrested yet.
