A federal grand jury handed down an indictment Tuesday against former FBI Director James Comey, setting off a chain reaction that landed squarely on the doorstep of conservative media host Jack Posobiec — and produced one of the more surreal moments in recent political broadcasting.
Comey faces two federal counts tied to a photograph he posted to Instagram in May 2025. In the image, seashells on a North Carolina beach were arranged to form the numbers “86 47.”
Federal prosecutors allege the post constituted a criminal threat against President Donald Trump, who serves as the nation’s 47th president.
The slang term “86” carries roots in the restaurant industry, where it signals that a menu item has been removed or eliminated.
Prosecutors argued the combination of that term with Trump’s presidential number crossed the legal threshold from protected speech into a criminal threat.
Comey deleted the post after it drew immediate backlash. He has maintained that no threat was intended, describing the indictment in a Substack video as the government coming after him once again over what he characterized as a beach photograph.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges at a Department of Justice press conference, framing the conduct as a clear violation of federal law.
FBI Director Kash Patel stated that Comey, as a former FBI director, was fully aware of the gravity of what such a post would communicate.
The indictment quickly became ammunition for commentators on the left, who surfaced a 2022 social media post by Posobiec — host of Human Events Daily and a prominent conservative voice — in which he wrote “86 46,” a parallel construction referencing then-President Joe Biden, the 46th president. Unlike Comey, Posobiec never removed the post.
CBS chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett confronted Acting Attorney General Blanche with the comparison live on CBS Mornings on Wednesday, pressing him on whether the Department of Justice would pursue Posobiec under the same legal standard applied to Comey.
Blanche rejected the premise. “That’s not how a grand jury does its work,” he said. “They don’t just look at a single image and then say, ‘OK, yes, we’ll indict,’ or ‘OK, no, we won’t indict.’ They do an investigation.”
Blanche went further, noting the extended timeline of the Comey probe.
“This conduct took place in May of last year, May 15. It has been almost a year. I assure you, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the U.S. Attorney’s office have not been sitting around doing nothing. They have been investigating. I have no idea whether there was an investigation into the other times that that post has been made and whether that investigation yielded different results,” he said.
Posobiec addressed the controversy on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” — and made clear from the outset that he was not treating the comparison as a serious legal threat.
“Well Steve, I saw the attorney General’s comments and I saw the CBS report, I do remember the tweet from 2022, and I’ve discussed this with my family, and I’ve discussed this with my legal team, and as of this time, I am now fully prepared to turn myself in state’s evidence to cooperate with the Department of Justice and testify against James Comey,” he said. “I await my opportunity to testify and be called in court.”
The sarcasm aside, Posobiec made a substantive argument that the Comey situation involved more context than a single social media image. He pointed to Comey’s book — centered on the subject of political assassinations — as a key factor in understanding the intent behind the post.
“His book was about political assassinations, and his post was meant to gin up interest for his book about political assassinations,” Posobiec said.
“So it’s up to James Comey to have to now go in and explain how this was part of a marketing strategy for his book, again about political assassinations, after we had already faced two high-profile political assassinations.”
Posobiec then drew a direct line between his own 2022 post and the political climate at that time, arguing the context was unmistakable.
His “86 46” post, he said, was a reference to calls for invoking the 25th Amendment against Biden — a topic that dominated conservative political discourse throughout that period — and not a call for violence.
“It’s very clear at the time, everyone understood the context with the 25th amendment, nobody’s had a problem with it at the time, because they knew the context was different,” Posobiec said.
The Biden-era Justice Department did not investigate or charge Posobiec over the post during the years it remained publicly visible.
The current DOJ has offered no public indication of whether a similar investigation into the 2022 post was ever opened.
