Seashells, a Secret Code, and a Second Indictment: James Comey Faces 10 Years for an Instagram Post

Seashells, a Secret Code, and a Second Indictment: James Comey Faces 10 Years for an Instagram Post

On May 15, 2025, James Comey was walking a North Carolina beach when he photographed seashells arranged to spell out "86 47," posted it to Instagram with the caption "Cool shell formation on my beach walk," and then quickly deleted it. That single photo — gone the same day he shared it — has now landed the former FBI Director in federal court for the second time. A grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina indicted him on April 28, 2026, on two felony counts carrying up to 10 years in prison.

The DOJ's case rests on the numbers themselves. "47" is widely understood to refer to Trump, the 47th president. "86" is slang with multiple meanings — including "to kill." Prosecutors argue Comey "knowingly and willfully" threatened the president's life and transmitted that threat across state lines, citing two federal statutes. Comey has denied any wrongdoing and said it never occurred to him that people associate those numbers with violence. This indictment is the DOJ's second attempt: a previous case was dismissed in November 2025, after a September 2025 indictment on separate charges.

The path to conviction is steep. Prosecutors must clear a substantial First Amendment hurdle — establishing a "true threat" by proving Comey's subjective intent and that a reasonable person would read the post as a genuine declaration of violence. Legal observers say that bar is unlikely to be met.

Gobble's Take: If the government can indict a man twice over deleted seashells, your Instagram grid is doing more legal work than you think.

Source: r/TrueReddit

The Pentagon Wants to Demote a Senator for Reminding Troops That Illegal Orders Are Illegal

Last November, Senator Mark Kelly — retired Navy captain, former astronaut — appeared in a video alongside five other Democratic lawmakers with military or intelligence backgrounds. Their message was simple: service members have the right to refuse illegal orders. For that, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth initiated proceedings to formally censure Kelly and lower his retirement rank.

A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit didn't hide its skepticism Thursday. Judge Florence Pan, a Biden appointee, put the government's position in stark terms: "You're saying that, if he wants to speak freely, he should discharge himself, which means giving up his retirement pay, giving up his rank, giving up all of those things. That that is the price that our military retirees and veterans should pay if they want to speak freely?" Kelly's lawyer, Ben Mizer, called the punishments "textbook retaliation against disfavored speech" and noted that Kelly "simply recited the bedrock proposition of military law that every service member learns when they enter the military." The DOJ countered that the video was a "wink, wink and a nod" about specific ongoing operations — an inference the judges received coolly.

A federal judge already blocked the Pentagon's efforts in February, ruling that no court had ever extended reduced First Amendment protections — the doctrine applied to active-duty troops to preserve military discipline — to retired service members. The appeals court now has to decide whether Hegseth's reach extends beyond the end of a soldier's service. The other Democrats in the video were Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Reps. Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, and Jason Crow — none of whom, so far, have faced similar proceedings.

Gobble's Take: The government's argument, distilled: your right to quote military law ends the moment you retire from enforcing it.

Source: r/Foodforthought

79 Children Gassed Walking to School, Sitting in Strollers, Breathing at Home

A girl cried "It burns!" while the chemical stuck to her skin. An asthmatic teenager gasped in a smoke-filled bedroom. An infant stopped breathing. These weren't accidents on a battlefield — they were in Broadview, Illinois; Columbus, Ohio; Minneapolis; Chicago; Portland, Oregon. ProPublica identified 79 children across the country harmed by tear gas or pepper spray deployed by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration's enforcement crackdown.

The reporting is built on videos. One captures agents releasing tear gas into a crowd containing at least seven children — moments before someone shouts "There's children here." Another shows a Customs and Border Protection officer shooting pepper balls into streets already flooded with white smoke, then muttering "Fuck yeah" and shouting "Woo!" The Department of Homeland Security's response has been to blame "agitators" in crowds and parents for putting their children in harm's way. But the agency's own inspectors general have previously found that officers have historically been undertrained on these weapons — and DHS's policies on their use are less strict than those of some local police departments.

Judges in specific cases described the use of these "less lethal" weapons as excessive, but found themselves without authority to restrict their use nationwide. Children in other communities kept getting hurt. The long-term health consequences for kids exposed to these chemicals — who are more vulnerable than adults by virtue of smaller lungs and proximity to the ground where gases concentrate — remain largely unstudied.

Gobble's Take: When "less lethal" is the category that includes an infant stopping breathing, the label has stopped doing any work.

Source: r/TrueReddit

EJ Johnson Called the Met Gala a 'Graveyard' and Fashion Twitter Has Logged Off to Cope

EJ Johnson — son of Magic Johnson, longtime fixture of the fashion-forward celebrity circuit — watched the 2026 Met Gala and chose violence. His verdict: "The Graveyard This Event Has Become."

It's the kind of quote that circulates because it crystallizes something people already felt but couldn't quite articulate. The Met Gala was built on a reputation for avant-garde risk-taking, the one night a year when genuine sartorial weirdness could share a red carpet with genuine star power. Johnson's two-line dismissal lands as a cultural eulogy — the moment an insider officially calls time of death on an institution's relevance.

Whether the Gala is salvageable is a separate question. What Johnson's comment does is give the growing chorus of critics a pithy epitaph: not a slow decline, not a "concerning trend," but a graveyard. Fashion has a long history of periodically declaring itself dead before reinventing spectacularly — but reinvention requires someone willing to take a risk first.

Gobble's Take: If the most daring thing said about the Met Gala this year came from someone watching it at home, the dress code has officially become optional.

Source: Complex

Quick Hits

• Druski skewers the British-actor pipeline: Comedian Druski dropped a new skit taking aim at the Hollywood trend of Black British actors being cast in American roles — and the internet is debating whether he has a point. Complex
• Lord of the Flies gets a Netflix adaptation: NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour weighs in on the streaming remake of William Golding's classic — and whether a prestige TV budget can do justice to one of literature's bleakest visions of human nature. NPR

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• The week China packed its suitcases — and the world felt it
• Americans have spent $24 billion extra at the gas pump since March
• Republicans want $72 billion for deportation machinery — and $1 billion for Trump's ballroom
• Star Wars fans get a psychoanalytic reminder: the Empire doesn't only live on screen
• The abortion pill is now the front line of reproductive rights in America