Todd Blanche Goes Full ‘What Sea Shellgate Case?’ Now That Everyone’s Making Fun Of Him

After Barack Obama flagged the “politicization of our justice system” and the Trump Department of Justice’s fixation with “using that to go after their political enemies,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche rebuffed the accusation — coming days after the DOJ indicted former FBI Director James Comey for posting a picture of sea shells to Instagram — by telling CBS News that he doesn’t really know anything about all that.

The nation’s top law enforcement official went full “new phone, who dis?” when asked about his job.

He said the latest Comey indictment, which accused the former FBI director of threatening the 47th president by posting a photo of seashells arranged to form the numbers “86 47,” was just one of the thousands of cases brought by the Justice Department every year. He insisted the case was spearheaded by “local prosecutors” and “local agents.”

“I don’t even know their names,” Blanche said of the North Carolina-based federal prosecutors.

Damn, US Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina Ellis Boyle! Todd Blanche did you super dirty.

But Blanche wants CBS viewers taking a break between NCIS clones to understand that the Department of Justice doesn’t get involved in every little case and, when it came to indicting the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, no one in senior leadership really knew anything about it.

And there’s certainly no video evidence to suggest that Blanche is lying through his teeth, right?

Like, for example, a fully staged press conference Blanche chaired in order to giddily announce the Comey indictment. A press conference held less than two weeks ago, where Blanche appeared alongside current-against-all-odds FBI Director Kash Patel and… Ellis Boyle. Blanche introduces Boyle by name, for what it’s worth.

There are daytime soap operas with more convincing amnesia plotlines than Blanche is peddling.

This also complicates Blanche’s newfound “this is just one of the thousands of cases” position. The Acting AG and sitting FBI Director don’t hold press conferences for “one of the thousands of cases.” They wanted all the attention for indicting Comey — a classic example of prosecuting the person and not the crime — to placate Donald Trump, who couldn’t have been happy when the DOJ’s last attempt to prosecute Comey (on less goofy, if nonetheless frivolous, charges) collapsed in an avalanche of incompetence.

As for this case being the work of random local agents, Patel took the mic and bragged that this indictment was the product of a meticulous federal investigation, which Patel’s agents have “investigated over the past 9, 10, 11 months.” Patel was so eager to drape himself in some personal responsibility for the case that he breached grand jury secrecy, volunteering details about what the grand jury heard. Sorry, Nancy Guthrie… we’d love to find you, but Kash Patel is busy pulling agents off everything from child sex predators to terrorists to spend months scouring Jim Comey’s Insta.

Blanche spent days branding this indictment as a professional probe. Now that the receipts are in and America is laughing, the branding has apparently shifted to “I never even saw these assholes before!“

Unfortunately, NBC already dug into this case and has reporting that Blanche pushed this case immediately after his elevation to the interim top job:

But after Bondi was out, and new acting Attorney General Blanche sought to win Trump’s appointment to the job permanently, the “seashells” case gained new steam, the people said. Blanche’s aides instructed Boyle to seek a grand jury indictment of Comey and he and a relatively junior prosecutor obtained one in the Eastern District on April 28.

The “I don’t know their names” line is also doing the secondary work of giving Blanche preemptive distance. The Comey indictment rests on a theory that the Supreme Court already rejected in Counterman. Comey took a picture of a bunch of shells, “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 indictment states comically. Too bad the Supreme Court ruled three years ago that this cannot sustain a conviction and the government must prove that the defendant subjectively understood that the statement would be perceived as threatening. Given that the grand jury was told that Comey deleted the post after explaining that he’d never heard of “86” having any violent connotations — a fact we know because Patel let his inhibition down and violated grand jury secrecy — this should doom the indictment.

Say what you will about Todd Blanche, but he totally gets the core value of this administration: loudly take all the credit, equally loudly refuse all the responsibility.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.