Seashells, Licenses, and Scientists: The Logic of Punishing the Visible Few

On Tuesday, April 28, the Department of Justice indicted former FBI Director James Comey for a second time. The charge: that a photo of seashells on a North Carolina beach, arranged to spell "86 47," constituted a criminal threat against the life of the President of the United States. On the same day, the FCC ordered Disney to file early license renewals for all eight of its ABC-owned television stations, years ahead of schedule. Four days earlier, the White House had fired all 22 members of the National Science Board, the independent body created by Congress in 1950 to oversee the National Science Foundation.

Three institutions. Three different domains. One week. I want to work through whether this convergence is coincidence, normal partisan governance, or something more intentional — because the answer matters for what comes next.

Start with the Comey case, because it's the clearest test. The indictment, filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina¹, charges Comey under 18 U.S.C. § 871 (threats against the president) and § 875(c) (transmitting threats in interstate commerce). The basis is an Instagram post from May 2025 showing seashells spelling "86 47." Comey deleted it the same day and said he "didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence."

Here's the thing: legal experts across the political spectrum think this case is a loser. Jonathan Turley⁵, a Fox News contributor and longtime Comey critic, wrote that "this indictment is facially unconstitutional absent some unknown new facts." First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh told CNN² that "this is not going anywhere. This is clearly not a punishable threat." The Supreme Court's standard in Counterman v. Colorado (2023) requires prosecutors to prove the speaker was at minimum recklessly indifferent to whether their communication would be perceived as a genuine threat. A seashell photo, deleted the same day with a posted explanation, is unlikely to clear that bar.

So why bring it? This is the DOJ's second attempt to prosecute Comey. The first indictment, for allegedly lying to Congress, was dismissed in November 2025³ after a federal judge found the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed. That first case was brought, according to public reporting⁴, after Trump publicly urged then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue charges. Career prosecutors reportedly objected. And the backdrop is vivid: Trump fired Bondi herself in April¹² because, as NBC News reported¹¹, she had not "executed on his vision" — specifically, she had failed to successfully prosecute his political opponents. Her replacement is Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal defense attorney, who is now acting Attorney General and who personally announced the Comey indictment.

The trail from presidential demand to prosecution is not hidden. It's documented on Truth Social. Trump wrote, in a since-deleted post directed at Bondi: "What about Comey, Adam 'Shifty' Schiff, Leticia??? They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done."

I think reasonable people can disagree about whether this constitutes formal "coordination" in the sense of a signed directive flowing from the White House to the DOJ to the FCC. I don't think that distinction matters as much as people imagine. The more important question is whether the function of these actions is best understood as legitimate governance or as something else.

The FCC action is the second brick. The commission ordered Disney to file early license renewals for its eight ABC stations, citing an ongoing investigation into Disney's DEI policies⁶ that began in March 2025 when FCC Chairman Brendan Carr sent a letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger. The FCC says the timing is unrelated to Jimmy Kimmel's joke about Melania Trump days before the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting. But the FCC hadn't used this early-renewal authority in decades, according to CNN⁷ — and the action came the same day Trump publicly called for Kimmel's firing. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez called the move "unprecedented, unlawful, and going nowhere."

Like the Comey indictment, this action is unlikely to succeed on the merits. As one media law expert told CNN⁷, "the legal standard for denying a license renewal is almost insurmountable." The FCC has not revoked a broadcast TV station license in over 40 years. These licenses aren't due for renewal until 2028 at the earliest. The formal justification (DEI investigation) has been running for a year, but the trigger for the accelerated timeline is transparent to anyone paying attention.

The third brick is the National Science Board. All 22 members were fired on April 24 by email⁸ with no explanation. The NSB's members serve staggered six-year terms specifically designed to insulate the body from political turnover. As Science magazine reported⁹, dismissed board member Keivan Stassun believes the board's public criticism of Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's budget "antagonized the administration." The NSF has already lost over 30% of its staff since January 2025 and the administration has proposed cutting its $9 billion budget by more than half — a proposal Congress rejected. Without an advisory board, as Stassun told PBS¹⁰, "such cuts may be easier to execute."

Now, the skeptic's response to all of this goes something like: these are independent institutional actions that happen to occur in the same window. Different agencies, different statutory authorities, different timelines. A politically active administration pursuing its ideological interests simultaneously across multiple domains is just what politically active administrations do. You don't need a conspiracy theory when normal partisan governance produces the same observable pattern.

I take this objection seriously. And I agree that formal coordination — a White House memo directing the FCC, DOJ, and Presidential Personnel Office to act in concert — has not been documented and may not exist. But I think the objection misses the point, because the mechanism that makes these actions function as deterrence does not require coordination.

Here is what I mean. Each of these actions shares a specific structural feature: the gap between the legitimate institutional purpose and the public impact of the action is enormous. The Comey indictment is, by wide legal consensus, unlikely to produce a conviction. The FCC license review is almost certainly not going to result in revocation. The NSB firing eliminates an oversight body but doesn't directly change NSF policy. If you evaluate each action solely on its stated institutional objective, it looks like a waste of prosecutorial and regulatory resources.

But if you evaluate them as signals — public demonstrations of the costs of visible criticism — they are extremely efficient. A former FBI director faces arrest for a beach photo. A $200 billion media conglomerate has its broadcast licenses called in days after the president demands that one of its hosts be fired. An entire scientific advisory board is eliminated weeks after publicly opposing the president's budget. Whether or not anyone coordinated these actions, the signal is coherent, and every journalist, executive, and government scientist can read it.

The strongest evidence that this signal is the point — not a side effect — comes from the Comey case specifically. The DOJ knows the First Amendment standard for "true threats." Jonathan Turley knows it. Eugene Volokh knows it. Todd Blanche, a former federal defense attorney, certainly knows it. A case this legally fragile is not designed to produce a conviction. It is designed to produce an arrest warrant, a press conference, and the spectacle of a former FBI director being charged with threatening the president's life over seashells. That spectacle has a specific audience, and it isn't a jury.

This is where I part company with the "just normal politics" explanation. Normal political prosecution seeks convictions. Normal regulatory enforcement seeks compliance. These actions seek something else: they seek visibility. And visibility in the service of making opposition costly is the definition of deterrence.

I should be clear about what I am not claiming. I am not claiming that Trump personally orchestrated the FCC's timeline or the NSB email. I am not claiming that Brendan Carr takes instructions from Todd Blanche. I am claiming something both simpler and harder to refute: that an executive branch organized around punishing the president's critics — one in which the attorney general was fired for insufficient aggression against political enemies and replaced by the president's personal lawyer — produces actions that function as coordinated deterrence even when no one has to pick up the phone. The through-line is not a memo. It is a personnel system that selects for people who understand the assignment.

The most important indicator to watch now is what happens at the margins — not to Comey, who has resources and visibility to fight back, but to the people doing the quiet calculus. The journalist deciding whether to run a critical story. The scientist weighing whether to publish inconvenient findings. The FCC commissioner calculating the cost of dissent. The American Enterprise Institute reported¹³ in April that FIRE survey data from January 2026 shows Americans are about five percentage points more likely to say the country is headed in the wrong direction on freedom of expression compared to a year earlier, and that confidence in the president to defend First Amendment rights has declined across the political spectrum. That number, and whether it continues to move, will tell us more about whether deterrence is working than any indictment will.

Watch the Comey case for an early motion to dismiss on First Amendment grounds — I predict the indictment will not survive it. Watch whether Disney makes any content or personnel decisions in the 30-day window before the FCC filing deadline on May 28. And watch whether Congress acts to reconstitute the NSB, or whether the body simply ceases to function, leaving the $9 billion NSF without the oversight structure Congress specifically designed for it. The answers to those three questions will determine whether this week was a display of power, or the beginning of its consolidation.