The Dictatorship
Republicans shrug off new charges against James Comey
For the second time in seven months, former FBI Director James Comey was indicted on Tuesday, with the Department of Justice alleging he threatened President Donald Trump when he posted a photo on Instagram of seashells spelling out “86 47.”
To Democrats, the charges were “baseless,” “disgraceful” and “ridiculous.” To Republicans, it depends on who you ask.
Although there were some GOP lawmakers who expressed discomfort with the indictment on Wednesday, most Republicans tried to duck questions — with some even endorsing the charges.
Asked if the Comey indictment was warranted, Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., didn’t miss a beat.
“Anybody that’s gonna threaten the president, any president of the United States, I think that’s where indictments are warranted,” said Donalds, a close Trump ally who’s running for governor in Florida with the president’s endorsement.
Shown a printout of Comey’s post, Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said Comey “knows what he’s doing.”
“Comey knows better than that. That was intentional,” Norman said. “He’s not somebody that just got into the political game. So yeah, he should’ve been indicted.”
And Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said Comey’s Instagram post was “obviously a signal.”
“Eighty-six is — either you’re working in a restaurant, or you’re wanting to kill somebody,” Burchett said. “And 47 is obviously President Trump.”
Even Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, one of three Republicans representing a district that Vice President Kamala Harris won in 2024, didn’t find fault with the indictment.
“Director Comey can play cute and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t really mean assassination,’” Lawler said. “But when you’re saying ‘86 47,’ I think people are smart enough to understand what that actually means.”
Pressed on whether the conduct was criminal, Lawler — who said he’d defer to the DOJ on the judicial process and underscored the need to take threats of political violence seriously — responded with a tautology. “He was indicted, so seemingly,” he said.
The apparent GOP approval of the Comey indictment came one day after a grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina formally charged the former FBI director with threatening the president and transmitting that alleged threat across state lines.
Comey voluntarily surrendered and made his initial appearance before a judge in Virginia on Wednesday, marking the second time the DOJ has indicted Comey. In September 2025, the former FBI director was charged with making a false statement and obstruction of a congressional proceeding on allegations that he lied during a Senate hearing in September 2020.
In November 2025, a judge dismissed the case, determining that then-interim U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan was unlawfully appointed.
But unlike the previous indictment, Tuesday’s charges center entirely on a photo Comey posted on Instagram last year showing seashells that spell out “86 47,” with the caption “Cool shell formulation on my beach walk.”
It was the same slang that right-wing activist Jack Posobiec used in 2022, when he wrote on X “86 46” — an apparent reference to then-President Joe Biden. But unlike Trump’s Department of Justice, Biden’s DOJ didn’t prosecute the conservative influencer.
Asked about the differences between the two cases, Republicans tried to sidestep the question.
“That’s really a question for the attorney general, not me,” Donalds said.
Norman, meanwhile, pointed to the assassination attempts against Trump — the most recent being the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.
“The difference is now we’ve had three attempts on the president’s life,” Norman said.
He also said Comey should know better. “He’s not somebody that just got into the political game,” Norman added.
Of course, not every Republican was so ready to endorse the charges.
“If it’s just down to one picture and a piece of sand, doesn’t sound appropriate to me,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who’s retiring at the end of this term, told MS NOW. “If the entire case is premised on ‘86 47’ written in conch shells on the sands of a North Carolina beach, that looks like it’s pretty weak.”
Tillis said he went “to the end of the internet” and concluded that, “I can’t find any example where it represents a threat.”
Ultimately, Tillis said, this was about “a picture in the sand.”
“Is that really the level of pettiness that we’re at now?” he asked.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, also told MS NOW she doesn’t believe the social media post was a threat to Trump.
“It just seems to me that this is more executing on a political grievance,” she said.
Tillis and Murkowski also suggested there was little difference between Posobiec’s post and Comey’s case.
“There’s no difference,” Tillis said, with Murkowski saying the only difference was “who’s going after them.”
Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., another retiring Republican, meanwhile, said that, while it was “foolish” for Comey to post the photo, the prosecution is an “overreach.”
“It’s more that weaponization of the law,” he told MS NOW. “And I’m not saying Trump is the only one that’s done it. It happened in the previous administration. But we got to stop the cycle. The cycle’s unhealthy.”
But while there were some Republicans defending and criticizing the charges, most Republicans who MS NOW asked about the indictment fell into a third category: professed ignorance and deference to the DOJ.
Asked about the indictment, Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., told MS NOW he didn’t know about “the details of that investigation.”
Presented with a printout of Comey’s post and asked if it was a threatening message, Burlison said he thought the post was “disgusting.
“I think he knew exactly what he was doing,” Burlison said of Comey. “I’ll just let the courts decide whether or no he had intent.”
And on the Posobiec post, it was the same message: “That’s not a topic that is one that I’ve been, like, on top of,” Burlison told MS NOW.
Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., initially said he had not read the details of the indictment. After being shown a photo of Comey’s post, he told MS NOW he wasn’t a lawyer. “I’m a doc, I’m a Marine. I’ll let the lawyers take care of that,” he said.
Asked about the indictment, Rep. Mike Flood, R-Neb., said he also didn’t know the facts of the indictment. And when MS NOW showed him a photo of Comey’s post, he insisted there was more to the story.
“I haven’t had the benefit of knowing what was in the investigation or what the grand jury was presented, but I have to believe there’s more to this than just this picture,” he said.
It was a similar situation on the Senate side, where a handful of GOP lawmakers said they weren’t up to speed on the indictment, and therefore couldn’t weigh in on its merits.
“I’ve not followed that,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said. “Somebody has to explain it to me. I just don’t know what that’s about.”
Asked if he believed “86 47” was a death threat, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said he had “never heard of it before.”
“He’s guilty of far more serious crimes than that,” Johnson said of Comey.
And pressed on the indictment and whether it was a death threat to the president, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo, told MS NOW she was sorry that she couldn’t really comment.
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
Jack Fitzpatrick and JM Rieger contributed to this report.
Mychael Schnell is a reporter for MS NOW.
FBI agents on Thursday raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a pro-democracy organization that helps register voters in that state, according to three people briefed on the search.
Agents also fanned out across the state, showing up at the homes of the group’s leaders and staff members, carrying some subpoenas and seeking information and electronic devices, according to the people, two of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive ongoing investigation. Members of the group had made contact with lawyers on Thursday to determine their legal options, the people said.
Prentiss Haney, a board member for Ohio Organizing Collaborative, told MS NOW Thursday night that agents approached people with connections to Ohio Organizing Collaborative, including some who had performed basic canvassing and volunteer work for the group, and began pressing them for information.
Agents were “basically trying to fish for information,” said Haney.
“They had agents all across the state going to civil rights leaders and community leaders’ doors intimidating them, coming and demanding that they talk about literally anything they would ask,” Haney said, adding that agents “asked them if they’re committing voter fraud, just on their doors, in front of their houses with their children, and just following them to work and school.”
Haney said some of the people said the agents approached without warrants.
“Just straight-up intimidation tactics,” he said.
Spokespeople for the FBI and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Thursday night.
Those sources familiar with the investigation said they are concerned this new effort in Ohio is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to sow doubt and distrust in voting integrity in key swing states ahead of the midterm elections.
Federal agents have in recent months launched inquiries and investigations into voting protocols in Georgia and Wisconsin, have subpoenaed voting records in Arizona and sought reviews of voting machines in Puerto Rico.
According to its website, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative facilitates statewide voter registration through grassroots, community-led programs, including its “Democracy Builders” initiative. This collaborative works in Ohio’s major metropolitan areas, such as Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, to help underrepresented communities register to vote and provides other support.
The group has also joined lawsuits challenging redistricting efforts that it argues reduce Black voters of representation. These lawsuits also “stand your ground” laws that allow a person to shoot someone if they feel threatened.
Haney said the Cleveland raid and harassment of staff are unjustified and that investigators lack any evidence of wrongdoing.
“How can they distract and intimidate civil rights leaders and voters and community leaders who are helping people get registered to vote and create a national spectacle about it?” he said.
“That is the only reason why they would choose to do that, do it now, in the middle of a contested political election in the state. There’s no other reason. They have no evidence of that.”
Carol Leonnig is a senior investigative reporter with MS NOW.
Will McDuffie is a reporter for MS NOW.
Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.
Laura Barrón-López covers the White House for MS NOW.
The Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s attempt to execute Jeffery Lee with nitrogen gas after lower courts stopped the state from executing him with that method.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch voted to side with the state, according to the court’s unexplained order on Thursday night denying the state’s emergency application.
On Tuesday, a Trump-appointed judge in Alabama blocked the state from executing Lee under its nitrogen-hypoxia protocol. U.S. District Judge Emily Marks found that Lee proved the state’s method violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
She emphasized that although she was issuing a permanent injunction against the nitrogen method, she wasn’t banning the state from executing Lee. She said the record showed his alternative proposal of the firing squad “significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain as compared to nitrogen-hypoxia.”
Under precedent adopted by the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority, an inmate who challenges an execution method as unconstitutional must propose an alternative method that is feasible, readily implemented and significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain.
Having scheduled Lee’s execution for Thursday, Alabama officials moved to lift Marks’ injunction in an effort to proceed as planned. Procedurally, they first had to ask Marks herself for relief. In their motion to the judge, they said she downplayed the risks of the firing squad, as well as the state’s concern about finding willing and able executioners for the shooting method.
State officials further said the fact that they scheduled Lee’s execution for Thursday “should have sunk his claim.” They said that “however easy or hard it would be to implement a firing squad in the abstract, there’s no support for the view that it could be done two days from the Court’s decision that it satisfies the Eighth Amendment test.”
Marks rejected the motion to lift her injunction, noting that the state’s urgent motion did “little more than repeat the arguments it made previously,” which she also had rejected. She added that the state had no right to complain about the timing because it was the state that set Lee’s execution while litigation was pending.
A divided three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declined to disturb Marks’ ruling. The panel’s majority recounted that a judge’s permanent injunction like the one Marks issued is entitled to deference and can be overturned only if the judge abused her discretion. With that in mind, the majority said her findings were “amply supported by the evidence presented.”
And noting that courts reviewing motions for urgent relief consider the “irreparable harm” at stake, the majority observed: “It goes without saying that Mr. Lee would suffer irreparable harm if he were executed pursuant to a method that the district court has found unconstitutional.”
On the other hand, the majority said the state’s preferred Thursday execution timing “is not a magical date” and that “the injury to the State caused by a delay would not be irreparable because the district court’s injunction allows it to execute Mr. Lee by any other authorized method (including lethal injection or the electric chair).”
Trump-appointed Judge Robert Luck was the panel dissenter. He began by recalling that Lee was sentenced to die for robbing and murdering Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson 26 years ago. “Unlike his victims, Lee was allowed to choose his method of execution,” he added, referring to Lee’s initial choice of nitrogen hypoxia as an alternative to lethal injection during a previous round of litigation.
“For as long as we’ve had an Eighth Amendment, the Supreme Court has never held that a state’s method of execution qualifies as cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment,” Luck wrote. “Because we shouldn’t do so here, I would grant the state’s motion to stay the injunction.”
Lee’s jury had recommended a life sentence, but the judge sentenced him to death under Alabama’s “judicial override” option, which has since been abolished.
The state cited Luck’s dissent in seeking emergency relief from the Supreme Court on Thursday. Officials told the high court that if the lower court ruling in Lee’s favor stands, it would be “unprecedented in American history.” The state said it would not only “portend the first-ever permanent ban on a legislatively enacted method” but would also “expand the concept of cruelty well beyond the bounds of the Eighth Amendment.”
Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck, an expert on the Supreme Court’s so-called shadow docketsubmitted an amicus brief opposing the state. He said Alabama was trying to do something procedurally that it shouldn’t be allowed to do. He explained that unlike in other emergency challenges that states have brought to the justices, Alabama wasn’t challenging a temporary execution stay issued by a lower court, but rather a permanent injunction.
“After all,” Vladeck said in the brief, “allowing Alabama to execute Mr. Lee through a grant of emergency relief would necessarily frustrate this Court’s ability to conduct plenary review of the district court’s final, permanent injunction.”
Highlighting that point, Lee’s lawyers told the justices that the case was “in a procedural posture unlike every previous method of execution challenge that this Court has considered.” They noted that unlike other emergency litigation in capital cases, “this case comes to the Court following a full three-day bench trial on the merits — the first such trial anywhere on the constitutionality of nitrogen asphyxiation.”
They said Lee wasn’t challenging his death sentence or the state’s ability to execute him but rather “only the method that Alabama intends to employ.” They said the state wanted to make the case moot by executing Lee “using an unconstitutional and permanently enjoined method,” but that the state hadn’t “cited a single case in which this Court has intervened in a capital case in such an extraordinary way.”
Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
The Dictatorship
Kennedy Center board seeks delay of ruling on removal of Trump’s name by Friday deadline
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’shandpicked board at the Kennedy Center is mounting a last-minute effort to keep his name on the facade of the iconic performing arts facility before a court-ordered deadline to remove it by Friday.
The board voted on Thursday to seek a stay of U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper’s May 29 ruling that said Trump’s name was illegally added to the Kennedy Center, according to a person familiar with the move who requested anonymity to discuss a private meeting. The formal stay will be filed on Friday, the person said.
Cooper ruled that only Congress could institute a change to the Kennedy Center’s name and ordered references to Trump be removed by Friday. He also blocked the administration from closing the cultural and arts venue for major renovations that had been planned to start in July and last for two years.
The board move marks a shiftfrom a June 4 memo to staff from the Kennedy Center’s Office of General Counsel saying email signatures, letterhead and other documents must reflect the name as “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” or “Kennedy Center.”
The Kennedy Center’s website has dropped the president’s name. And an email earlier this week sent to membersoffering ticket packages for the June 28 Mark Twain Award for American Humor ceremony came from the Kennedy Center without including Trump’s name.
After ignoring the Kennedy Center for much of his first term, Trump has wielded tremendous influence over the venue during his return to office. Just a month into his second term, he oustedthe center’s previous leadership and replaced it with a hand-picked board of trustees that named him chairman. He brought in Richard Grenell to serve as president, a position he held until March when Matt Floca assumed the role.
The center’s lineup has included more Trump-friendly programming, serving as the venue for events such as the premiere of first lady Melania Trump’s documentary, “Melania.”
The board also announced it had renamed the facility the Trump Kennedy Center, a change scholars and lawmakers say must be initiated by Congress, and physically added the president’s name to the building’s facade.
The fallout from the arts community was swift and intense. Actor Daddy Rae,musician Bela Fleck and author Louise Penny were among the numerous artists who withdrew from appearances, while consultants such as musician Ben Folds and singer Renée Fleming resigned. Earlier this month, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, Jean Davidson, left to head the Los Angeles-based Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.
In addition to voting on the stay on Thursday, the board backed a resolution recognizing Trump’s “commitment to uphold this cherished American institution.”
- Bosnia beat Italy. Utica never recovered.
- Not another political World Cup
- Capitol agenda: What Schumer told us about AI
- Rick Scott lifts holds on Coast Guard promotions
- FBI raids Ohio voting-rights organization
- Supreme Court rejects Alabama’s attempt to conduct nitrogen gas execution
- Kennedy Center board seeks delay of ruling on removal of Trump’s name by Friday deadline
- Trump’s Iran strike deadlines keep shifting: A timeline of delays
- What’s most worrying about Trump’s ‘I love the inflation’ statement
- Senate Democrats’ political fortunes have improved. ‘It didn’t happen by accident,’ Schumer says.
-
Politics1 year agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
Politics1 year agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
Politics1 year agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship9 months agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words