Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Sunday the government has more evidence than an Instagram post supporting charges that former FBI Director James Comey threatened President Trump.
Last year Mr. Comey posted a photo on Instagram depicting seashells on the beach arranged to read “86 47,” which many took as support for killing Mr. Trump.
“This is not just about a single Instagram post,” Mr. Blanche said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“This is about a body of evidence that the grand jury collected over the series of about 11 months,” he said. “We will necessarily have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, at trial, every element of this crime, which we’re prepared to do.”
A grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, where Mr. Comey took the seashell photo, indicted the former FBI director on two counts, threatening the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce.
The charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
A redacted version of the indictment — the unredacted version is under seal — only references the Instagram post as evidence, saying “a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret [the post] as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”
Mr. Comey took down the photo soon after he posted it. He said he assumed the seashell formation was a political message but “it never occurred” to him that it was a call to assassinate Mr. Trump.
“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence,” he said in a separate explanatory post.
The number “86” can be used as a slang term for “get rid of” or “eliminate.” Mr. Trump is the 47th president.
Mr. Blanche said he could not share details of what the grand jury heard or found but that an array of evidence against Mr. Comey includes documents and witnesses.
“We are not talking about some political guy in D.C. running out and getting an indictment,” he said. “We are talking about career prosecutors in North Carolina systematically investigating a case with the FBI working with them, with the Secret Service working with them.”
Mr. Comey was previously indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on charges of lying to Congress. That case was thrown out after a federal judge ruled U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan was not properly appointed.
Sen. Adam Schiff, California Democrat, appeared on “Meet the Press” directly after Mr. Blanche and called the Comey indictment “frivolous” and “deeply illegitimate.”
He noted that Mr. Trump called on former Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict Mr. Comey and other political opponents.
“I was a prosecutor for almost six years. I never saw such a weak case,” Mr. Schiff said. “In the future in the Department of Justice, if anyone ever suggests bringing a case this weak, there’ll be a new name for it. They’ll be called ’seashells cases.’”
He predicted the case will be dismissed before it goes to trial, but if not “it will absolutely be thrown out by the jury.”
Mr. Schiff, who led the first impeachment trial against Mr. Trump, is among the Democrats the president said he wants the Justice Department to prosecute.
“I’m not concerned in the sense that if they bring a case against me, it’ll suffer the same fate as this one is likely to suffer,” the senator said.
Mr. Schiff said he is more worried about the reputation of the Justice Department and “scores of seasoned prosecutors who are leaving by the hundreds, by the thousands, who are asked to do unethical things and properly are saying no.”
