Think More: Wednesday, April 29, 2026

James Comey indicted in the Eastern District of North Carolina for threatening the President

John Hinderaker  ·  Power Line · April 28

The former FBI director was indicted on two counts under 18 U.S.C. § 871(a) and § 875(c), the federal statutes covering threats against the President and the interstate transmission of threats, over a May 2025 Instagram photograph of seashells arranged to read “86 47.” The case, returned by a grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina and assigned to Judge Louise Wood Flanagan, marks the second federal prosecution Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Justice Department has brought against Comey. What distinguishes Hinderaker’s take is that it comes from the Right and is openly skeptical: Comey’s post showed contempt for the President, he writes, but contempt is not a punishable threat, and weak cases hand reprehensible men the false coin of vindication. The line worth holding onto is that prosecutorial restraint is itself a conservative principle, even when the defendant is a man whose tenure at the Bureau warranted a more substantial reckoning.

Supreme Court strikes down Louisiana’s race-conscious congressional map

Joe Cunningham  ·  RedState · April 29

In a 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), Justice Samuel Alito wrote for a majority joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett that Louisiana’s elongated District 6, drawn after a federal court found the prior map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, could not survive Equal Protection scrutiny. The plaintiffs in Robinson v. Ardoin, the majority concluded, had failed to satisfy the threshold Gingles showing, leaving no compelling interest to justify race-conscious line-drawing. Alito invoked the framing of Shelby County v. Holder (2013): the Voting Rights Act exists to secure a better future, not to punish the past. Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson. The decision sharpens the limit on how far courts can push states toward race-based districts under Section 2 pressure, and it arrives in the middle of an extraordinarily contested mid-decade redistricting cycle. The political consequences of that timing will be substantial.

The young, violent political Left

Michael Barone  ·  Washington Examiner · April 29

Barone’s column lands three days after a man was apprehended charging the ballroom of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, reviewing 4,700 social-media posts from the suspect, Cole Allen, reported that Allen had repeatedly amplified claims that the July 2024 Butler assassination attempt against then-candidate Trump was staged. Allen is a registered Democrat and a small donor to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign. Barone places the WHCA incident inside a longer pattern: the 2017 shooting of Representative Steve Scalise at a Republican congressional baseball practice by a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders, the 2018 plot against Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home, and the September 2025 killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. The column does what too few are willing to do, which is read the trend line as written and name the political coalition from which the perpetrators have, with disturbing regularity, emerged.

United States indicts the governor of Sinaloa and ten senior officials in cartel conspiracy; Mexico refuses to extradite

Alexandra Koch  ·  Fox News · April 29

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced charges against the governor of Sinaloa and ten high-ranking state officials, alleging that they accepted millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel’s “Chapitos” faction, facilitated fentanyl shipments into the United States, and assisted in the torture and murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) source. Within hours, Mexico’s Secretariat of Foreign Affairs (SRE) replied that the extradition packages did not contain evidence sufficient to support arrest, and delivered a formal diplomatic reprimand, an extrañamiento, to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. The diplomatic protest is the news inside the news. President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government has chosen to defend its political class rather than to address the conspiracy named in the filings, and that choice tells you most of what you need to know about the structural problem any serious U.S. cartel policy must reckon with.

North Carolina removes 34,000 deceased registrants from voter rolls via the federal SAVE database

Alan Wooten  ·  Center Square via Just the News · April 28

North Carolina’s State Board of Elections, under Executive Director Sam Hayes, ran nearly 7.4 million voter records through the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database in mid-April and identified 34,000 registrations belonging to deceased individuals. Hayes acknowledged that the count exceeded what his team had anticipated. State Auditor Dave Boliek, who under a 2024 Republican-led reform now oversees the elections board, framed the cleanup as the discharge of a basic statutory obligation. The dead are not casting ballots, but a registration roll padded with the deceased is the predicate condition for fraud and the rhetorical condition for distrust. List maintenance is the unglamorous spine of election integrity, and the SAVE protocol is doing what it was designed to do.

After Gavin

Chris Bray  ·  Tell Me How This Ends · April 28

Bray’s latest, posted the night of the CBS-hosted gubernatorial debate at Pomona College, sits inside the running argument he has been building since joining The Federalist as a full-time writer in January: California is not an isolated case but the rest of the country’s preview. Eight candidates on the stage, a 26 percent undecided plurality among likely voters in the most recent CBS News/YouGov poll, and no breakout moment. The question more pointed than the field’s, in Bray’s reading, is what governs California after Newsom, and whether any of these candidates is equipped to reverse the structural insolvency, the ruined neighborhoods, and the permanent administrative class that produced both. His diagnosis is consistent with the rest of his California reporting. The difference now is that the campaign is real and the bench is visible.

Will America finally let itself build nuclear plants?

Emmet Penney  ·  The Free Press / Foundation for American Innovation · April 28

Penney opens with a fact that ought to disturb anyone who imagines the modern administrative state as a neutral facilitator of progress. The United States built its first civilian nuclear reactor in three years, between 1954 and 1957. Half a century later, the paperwork to win Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approval for the Vogtle reactors in Georgia took nearly four. Penney argues that an unusually bipartisan coalition, with the Trump Administration leaning in, may finally be moving to clear the regulatory thicket that has effectively prohibited new plants for two generations. The civilizational question is the one his piece implies but does not state. A country that cannot permit a reactor in less time than it once took to invent reactors is a country that has forgotten how to build, and the consequences of that forgetting extend well beyond the price of electricity.