On Tuesday, a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina handed down a two-count indictment against the former FBI director James Comey, charging him with threatening the life of President Donald Trump and transmitting that threat across state lines.
The basis for the charges: an Instagram post from May 2025 in which Comey shared a photo captioned "Cool shell formation on my beach walk." The shells on the sand spelled out "86 47." Each count carries a maximum of ten years in federal prison.
Comey deleted the post the same day it went up and issued an immediate clarification on social media. "I didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence," he wrote. "It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down." He later told interviewers that he and his wife had simply spotted the formation during a stroll along a North Carolina beach and read it as a quirky, possibly restaurant-themed joke. Despite the dubious explanation, from the moment the post became controversial, legal analysts were skeptical that a case against him was possible.
There still appears to be bipartisan agreement on this point.
"It's a seashell case, nine, ten months old, and it will never go anywhere," Joe Scarborough said on MSNOW's Morning Joe. "It will have the opposite impact, and they'll get laughed out of court."
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, one of Trump's more reliable legal allies, agreed the case has little legal merit, despite the indictment.
"To convict Comey, the Justice Department will have to show that his adolescent picture was a 'true threat' under 18 U.S.C. § 871 and § 875(c). It is not." He went further, invoking the founding era: "This nation was founded in rage. The Boston Tea Party was rage. In forming this more perfect union, we created the world's greatest protection of free speech in history." Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the prosecution's theory.
First Amendment protections for political speech are remarkably broad. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" - a standard that has shielded provocateurs far more combustible than a retired FBI director posting a picture of seashells.
Former CNN analyst Chris Cillizza has his own theory about what is really behind this latest indictment. According to Cillizza, Trump is less concerned about whether Comey goes to jail than he is with just making Comey's life miserable.
“It's impossible to separate both of those indictments, the one in September and the one today, from Donald Trump's absolutely repeatedly expressed belief that the Department of Justice exists to target and punish his political enemies,” Cillizza mused. “Now, again, whether they would actually be guilty in a court of law, we shall see, but to punish these people. So we saw Comey indicted in September 2025, since dropped. We saw Letitia James, another big political enemy in Donald Trump's mind of his, also indicted, charges dropped. We've seen John Bolton, the, a major Trump critic, indicted, and now we see Comey indicted again.”
Donald Trump doesn't really care if Jim Comey goes to jail.
He just wants to make Comey's life miserable for as long as possible. pic.twitter.com/7wsHW32kGp
Cillizza gets some things wrong here. The Letitia James and the previous Comey case were tossed by a Clinton-appointed judge who claimed that the Justice Department illegally appointed the prosecutor who brought the charges at President Donald Trump's urging. They were not tossed on the merits.
Is Trump trying to make life difficult for his enemies? Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche pushed back on this suggestion on CBS Tuesday, insisting the administration had been investigating the matter for nearly a year and that a grand jury - not the White House - returned the indictment. "Of course not, absolutely, positively not," Blanche said when asked whether Trump directed the charges. The indictment itself argues that a "reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances" would interpret the shell arrangement as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to President Trump. That framing will be tested the moment a federal judge reads the First Amendment.
There is a certain irony lodged in all of this. Trump spent years - genuinely - defending himself from what he called a weaponized justice system. The Russia investigation, the two bogus impeachments, the civil fraud trial in New York, the classified documents case, the January 6 prosecution: whatever one thinks of any individual charge, the cumulative weight of it was real and politically motivated in ways that even Trump's critics occasionally acknowledged.
But out of those assaults, the president emerged convinced that the DOJ had become a political instrument and that the only way to respond was to go after those who abused their power in the first place.
The trouble is that a seashell photograph does not make for a compelling demonstration of that principle. There are documented, substantive cases to be made against Comey - his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, his unauthorized leaking of memos to the press, and his role in initiating the surveillance of a sitting president's campaign. Those are the cases that would survive scrutiny, attract serious legal arguments, and perhaps hold up before a jury. Instead, the administration is going to federal court over a photo of seashells.
Blanche said Tuesday, "If anybody in this country thinks … that it is okay for anybody to threaten the president of the United States … then we have a bigger problem than I even imagined." That may be true. But first you have to prove the threat was real - and that argument, and experts on both sides aren't seeing how this meets that standard.
Tyler Durden Thu, 04/30/2026 - 18:50Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has been in a very public spat and back-and-forth with Congressional Democrats over the Trump administration's $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request, as well as over Iran war strategy and mounting costs.
Hegseth has turned to some classic wartime fearmongering: "What is it worth to ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon?" - he posed to members of Congress when pressed in a hearing.
Hegseth called the "reckless, feckless, and defeatist words of congressional Democrats" the United States' greatest adversary. At a moment Operation Epic Fury is about to reach 60-days on Friday, he's still insisting that this is not a 'forever war' with an open-ended timetable.
One figure to come out of the latest Congressional hearings this week is a $25 billion total Iran war price tag thus far:
A Pentagon official told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday that the war in Iran cost the United States $25 billion in the first two months.
Facing questions from ranking member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Acting Defense Department comptroller Jules Hurst testified that most of the cost was “in munitions” plus “[operations and maintenance] and equipment replacement.”
Smith thanked the Pentagon official for offering the most specific cost estimate since its first week, when Hurst said the price tag was roughly $11 billion. “I’m glad you answered that question because we’ve been asking for a hell of a long time and no one has given us the number.”
via ReutersHowever, the $25BN number immediately raised questions among skeptics, both within Congress and among media pundits, over whether this is a lowball number.
According to Responsible Statecraft:
Rep. Ro Khanna pushed back on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s assertion that the supplemental would only include $25 million for the mission in Iran specifically. “You’re saying $25 billion. If you come back and want to revise those numbers, because all the experts are disagreeing with you when it comes to today’s dollars in damage,” Khanna said.
Also Reuters has noted, "But it is unclear how the Pentagon arrived at the $25 billion amount given that a source had told Reuters last month that President Donald Trump's administration estimated that the first six days of the war had cost the United States at least $11.3 billion."
The case for skepticism is further fueled by the fact that the US military has lost so many expensive radar systems and aircraft throughout the war.
"Iran’s missiles and drones, and one devastating instance of so-called friendly fire, have destroyed US military equipment worth between $2.3bn and $2.8bn, the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies has calculated," one report has underscored.
U.S. officials say the Iran war has likely cost closer to $50 billion—about double the $25 billion publicly cited by the Pentagon.
The lower figure excluded major expenses like destroyed equipment and damaged bases.
Much of the added cost comes from replacing lost munitions…
But like with the Iraq and Afghan wars before, the true cost in both blood and treasure might not be known or fully assessed even for years to come. And that's assuming Trump's Iran quagmire gambit wraps up by then.
Tyler Durden Thu, 04/30/2026 - 18:20Wood McKenzie has released a report that US spending on power generation gear for data centers alone could hit $65 billion by 2030, more than triple the $20 billion logged last year. Data center capacity is forecast to reach 110 GW by the end of the decade, with Bloomberg also commenting that “total US spending on power-plant equipment may climb to $215 billion."
The increased spending for the heavy electrical equipment market sounds great, but unfortunately, there's no equipment to buy domestically.
WoodMac Sounds Alarm On Transformer Shortage Amid AI Data Center Boom https://t.co/PAIIhAfS5f
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 16, 2025Lead times for transformers, switchgear, and related gear stretch from 18-36 months and much of the shortfall is filled by imports from China, exposing the supply chain to the very geopolitical risks Washington claims to be racing against. The heavy reliance on imports for these grid-critical items led to the massive stack of Defense Production Act orders put out by the administration in April.
Sightline Climate data highlighted earlier shows nearly half of the roughly 16 GW of US data center capacity slated to break ground in 2026 now faces delay or outright cancellation. Only about 5 GW sit under active construction.
The explosion in AI data center energy demand has been ongoing for years now. From PJM’s frantic scramble for 15 gigawatts of new supply to feed hyperscaler loads to the eye watering capacity auction price spikes that data centers helped trigger.
That squeeze is accelerating two parallel trends.
First, hyperscalers are increasingly turning to behind the meter solutions. These include small nuclear reactors or gas fired generation directly on site. This approach allows them to bypass years-long waits for grid interconnection. Examples include Brookfield’s nuclear tied cloud venture to Nano Nuclear modular reactor studies and Talen Energy’s direct hookups.
Second, the cost pressure on households is drawing Washington’s attention. Grid upgrades required by the AI buildout have become the primary driver behind projected electricity rate increases. The Ratepayer Protection Pledge was signed back in March, which pushed hyperscalers to build, bring, or buy their own power and cover every dollar of the new transmission and distribution infrastructure.
The White House has also framed rapid AI infrastructure buildout as a national security imperative, leading to a conflict of interests between the demand for new data centers without stressing the grid or consumers. AI has been widely labeled by the White House as necessary for the safety of the country, and is the new modern-day arms race.
Tyler Durden Thu, 04/30/2026 - 17:55