Bulwark Takes - Todd Blanche Melts Down Defending Absurd Comey Case

Episode Date: May 3, 2026

On ‘Meet the Press’, Todd Blanche, Trump’s Acting Attorney General, tries to defend the Justice Department’s indictment of James Comey, but the explanation doesn’t hold up particularly well under scrutiny. Sam Stein and Will Saletan take on the flimsy argument, the timeline, and why the case is drawing skepticism, not just from critics but with Republicans as well.Tickets for our Bulwark Live shows in San Diego and Los Angeles in May

Your protein drink should work as hard as you do. That's why booster juice is hitting the gym harder than ever, brother. Meet your new gym buddies, the Way Too Good and Green Gaines booster mixers. Two new ripped and refreshing menu options that bench some serious protein. Perfect for pre-your post-workout. Way too good. And Green Gaines booster mixers tastes like motivation. So what are you waiting for?

Let's go. Booster Juice. Canadian-born blending since 1999. Everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwork. I'm here with Will Salton to discuss the Sunday shows. We watched them. We lived them. We laughed.

We cried. Will, how you doing, man? You good? I'm sore, man. I tried to play basketball this morning and my back was out. I'm still waiting for my invite, but that's a topic for another YouTube. Main character on the Sunday shows today, I thought was Todd Blanche, the interim attorney general, clearly wants to be the permanent attorney general.

he's gone forward with a number of very dubious prosecutions that seem to be stagnant that he's picked up and run really hard with. Among them is James Comey. And so Todd Blanche was on Meet the Press this morning. He was pressed by the host, Kristen Welker, about this and a bunch of other things. Before we get into the clips, like, what was your main takeaway about Blanche? I just felt, I don't know if I should feel sorry for the guy. No, you should not. So, you know, until this moment, I wasn't sure how corrupt Todd Blanche was.

I mean, he was Trump's personal lawyer. He gets put in this job. But he seems like a relatively honest person by the standards of the Trump administration, which is a low bar. This, the prosecution of Comey over the Seashells thing and his, and Blanche's defense of it shows me that Blanche has no integrity whatsoever. He completely exposed himself. Well, it's also, it's like, here's a guy who knows that he has one directive if he

wants to keep his job. And that's to do this. And he's got to go out and defend it. And that's not to apologize for him. That's actually a criticism of him. he could just resign. It's such, this prosecution, you talk to anyone in the legal profession and they're like, they're not incredulous.

They're laughing at how bad this prosecution is. So do you want to just play the, let's play the thing. Yeah, let's start because it's really good. All right. Let's play the first clip. This is Walker pressing him on the seashell prosecution folks, if you don't know. James Comey, like 11 months ago, took a picture of seashells on a seashore in North Carolina. It said 8647.

and he's like, oh, look at this thing I stumbled upon. And there was like a weird upbore because people, you know, in the conservative movement pretended like he was threatening to kill Trump when he wasn't. He took it down, said he didn't realize that people would interpret it that way, which they shouldn't have. And then 11 months later, he's prosecuted for it. So Blanche has asked about this, and this is what he has to say. How does that image of seashells amount to a serious threat against the president's life?

Well, every case requires an evaluation. investigation. And what you just showed is one part of that investigation. What you just showed is the Instagram post. Rest assured that the career assistant United States attorneys in North Carolina, the career FBI agents, the career secret service agents that investigated this case didn't just look at the Instagram post to walk away. That's why you saw an indictment last week, notwithstanding the fact that it was last May that the post was made. So I am not permitted to get into the details of what the grand jury heard or found, as you know. But, rest assured that it's not just the Instagram post that leads somebody to get indicted.

Sam, how many times did he say rest assured there? Like that's a like that's an answer. Yeah, yeah. Also the word career this, career that, like, you know, she's like, what do you got for me? And he's like, nothing, right? Nothing. Not only nothing.

He said, what did he say? I am not permitted to get into the details. I am not permitted to get into the details of what the grand jury heard or found, as you know. but rest assured that it's not just the Instagram post. Let me just do a little bit of contrast here. We have the White House correspondent's in her shooter case. Janine Piro, the prosecutor in that case, was on CNN today.

And she described in detail what they have on the shooter. She's like, we got video, we got a manifesto. We got these videos out, Jake, as soon as we could. We went into that detention hearing, and we put evidence on the record after the detention hearing so that we could be transparent, so that you could see the videos, you could see the evidence, you could see what we knew we already had. That's what we're about. We're about proving the case. Like, lots of evidence,

and she can tell us about it. Todd Blanche has bupkis. Bubkus. And then he does this sort of, oh, it's secret evidence. We can't tell you about it. Sure you can. You could do what Chenine Bureau did. You just got nothing. Now, they hold up this idea that because it took so long to do this end up, therefore, it has to be a serious indictment because they've been spending 11 months building the case, which they didn't put into the indictment that they released vis-a-vis the grand jury. The other thing, though, that I can't get over is, like, the case is predicated on this idea that James Comey wanted to kill the president, okay? Which he didn't, but let's just say, he wanted to kill the president, and he announced it

publicly that he wanted to kill the president. And their response is, yeah, we took 11 months to crack this case. If he's not big a threat, get on it, right? Like, go faster than that. So the whole thing is so stupid. Do you see where she talks about all the Etsy posts and the swag where people are selling 8647 gear? Should individuals selling or buying 8647 merchandise

be concerned that they're going to be prosecuted by the DOJ? This isn't about a single incident. Okay, this isn't, I mean, of course not. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like people are selling stuff on Amazon with 8647. Are you going to prosecute all those people? And he was like, no, of course, no. So on this 11 months thing, because this is really interesting, right?

So wait, we spent 11, he's saying in this interview. We took 11 months. Over the series of about 11 months, 11 months, 11 months, 11 months. So therefore, you should assume we have something. No, no, no, no, man. If you had something, you would tell us about it. Why did it take you 11 months? What intervening events, Sam, could explain why 11 months later they're indicting.

Oh, I know Pam Bondi got fired. Correct. And this guy got put in. So the reason that they're doing this is like he's auditioning. He was just put on the spot. And he was told through the firing of the previous AG, if you don't do this, you're out the door. And look, he didn't even need to be told. I mean, that's the thing is that.

And Welker, we'll play this clip. Walker, to her credit, was like Donald Trump has been pretty explicit about demanding these prosecutions, right? Like he put out that, what was supposed to be a DM to Pam Bondi saying, you got to get on this. and so therefore why should we not take these prosecutions as inherently political prosecutions? He's out there saying you want them. So let's play the clip. Back on September 20th, President Trump publicly posted a private message to then attorney general, Pam Bondi,

pressuring her to prosecute Senator Adam Schiff, James Comey, and Letitia James, writing, quote, they're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done. They impeached me twice. They indicted me five times over nothing. Justice must be served now. Why should the public believe that any case brought against the individuals listed there is an independent law enforcement decision and not retribution? Well, because you have investigations and you have indictments and you have the result. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Trump told Bondi do this for me. I'm ordering you to do it.

And then she does the indictment. And that result is supposed to convince us that it's honest, as opposed to she just responded to the president. Look, the timeline here, she shows that post from Trump. That was September 20th. Oh, my God. Two days later, Trump puts in Lindsay Halligan to do the indictment. And three days later, they get the indictment. So the timeline is super clear that that's the president giving a political order to the AG and putting his person in to make this happen. So the result was not evidence that it was clean.

The result was evidence that it was dirty. Right. And people don't remember. Lindsay Halligan was eventually disqualified from the post because of the way she was in which she was appointed, which then invalidated the Comey case, the separate prior Comey case, which was about whether or not he had lied to Congress. So then they had to do essentially a workaround, which was find another case and find another district. And that's how we ended up here. One little cutesy thing there. Blanche says, well, that case got dismissed, the Lindsay Halligan, the original indictment of Comey and Lettia

James. That guy can, that was a technicality. That was only because the prosecutor got invalidated, not because the evidence was. By the way, Sam, remind me, isn't that what happened to Donald Trump, like on the evidence he was never exonerated? It was that Judge Cannon, Chuck the case based on the appointment of the prosecutor. So Todd Blanche is essentially admitting that Trump himself was never exonerated on the evidence. Right. And also, but if he extend Blanche's argument, like the fact that a, you know, grand jury allowed him to go through, voted for. all right. If that's proof of guilt, which is essentially what Todd Blanche is getting at, then Donald Trump has had multiple cases involved in the end. Right. Right.

You saw, I didn't watch Tom Tillis, a retiring senator from North Carolina, but he was asked about this. What did he say? So Tillis was on CNN, and Tillis gets asked about the Comey case, and Tillis says, excuse me, I worked, I, Tom Tillis worked in the restaurant industry. And Tillis says, I've never heard it in the context of violent. If this whole case is based on a picture in the sand of of a North Carolina beach, it again makes no sense to me. Number one, 80s, I used to work in the restaurant industry, and I think 86 actually has its roots as a cook. That's my understanding, too.

It has its roots and 86ing the menu or 86ing the product. I can't find any evidence except some that's come up after the president made the comment about the movies. I know the penal code in North Carolina 187 means murder, but I can't find any evidence where 86 is used as a call for violence. Some people claim they have. But the point is, this is a Republican senator who, if you sat him as a juror in the case and you gave him the seashells, he would say, what are you talking about?

That is not evidence of an intent to commit violence. Yeah, on the shows with Blanche, I think he was read Jonathan Turley's critique of his case. I started thinking about that. I don't think, maybe I'm wrong and people could drop it in the comments and maybe you know something that I don't know because you read more than I do. Has there been like sort of an intellectual defense of the, this case from the conservative legal ecosystem. Like someone with some gravitas who's been like, actually, you know, there's something

there, even if it seems flimsy. I haven't read anything. I haven't seen anything for the simple reason that they're not showing us anything. Right. You know, if I were Napolitano or Turley or any of these guys, you got to show me some evidence before I'm going to go on TV or write something and say, you've got a case. Yeah. Well, not always.

I mean, sometimes they'll go out there and present some flimsy. defense and say it seems fine to me. I haven't seen a single piece like that, even from like a long-time contrarians. It is telling that that's not there. All right, then we're going to end on this because it was so juicy and hilarious. Todd Blanche was talking about other things beyond Comey. And the topic of conversation got to presidential priorities and they were alluding to the Save America Act, which is their big voter ID bill.

and he had what I think, I have to think, is a flub, but it made me chuckle. Let's play that. There's a lot of things that we can be doing. Like, voter ID. Like, every time you walk into a restaurant or a club, you have to show your ID. How about you have to show your ID to vote? That's not anything that's crazy. And that's what we should be talking about.

Now, look, I've been to a restaurant in a couple weeks. It's been a couple weeks. Have they done a new policy? Because last time I went, I did not have to show my ID when I went into the restaurant. Sam, are we going to the wrong restaurant? We'd be going to a higher class of restaurant where they, sir, I'm sorry, are you really Samuel Stein? Can you show me your identification?

I got to find the restaurant that demands ID at the dark. That's not a strip club. That's not a strip club. It's got to do. I think, you know, they're interested in your credit card. Yeah, for sure. I don't know if they're really interested in your driver's license. Oh, my God.

That must have been a flub. I can't imagine. He really believes that you have to show ID at a restaurant. All right, well, I got a bounce, man. Sunday is, I got a lot of shit going on. But thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. For those who watch, thank you for watching. Reminder, reminder, we got these live shows coming up in California, San Diego, May 20th, L.A., May 21st. We are busing between them. It's going to be me,

Tim, Sarah Longwell, get your tickets at the bulwark.com slash events. You're not going to want to miss it. It's going to be great. Until then, talk to you soon.