Comey indictment: Is the justice system broken?

With the prosecution of James Comey, “our country has entered a grave new period of injustice,” said The New York Times in an editorial. Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer for President Trump newly elevated to U.S. attorney in Virginia, obtained a grand jury indictment against the former FBI director last week on “highly dubious” charges that he made false statements and obstructed Congress during a 2020 Senate hearing. The indictment nearly didn’t happen. Scrambling to beat the statute of limitations, with no career prosecutors willing to assist, Halligan herself presented the case to the grand jury, which rejected a perjury charge and only narrowly approved the remaining counts. But happen it did, and Trump’s years of threats to prosecute his political enemies—Comey in particular, whom Trump blames for what he calls “the Russiagate hoax”—became America’s new reality. Comey is defiant, said Garrett M. Graff, also in The New York Times. He urged Americans to “keep the faith” and said that while his “heart is broken for the Department of Justice,” he’s confident of acquittal. But the fact of his indictment, at Trump’s explicit direction, is already “the most corrupt attack on the rule of law” in U.S. history.

Halligan has no case, said Andrew McCarthy in National Review. The central claim in her “ill-conceived” indictment is that Comey lied in 2020 when he stated to Sen. Ted Cruz that he never “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports” about a 2016 investigation into then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Comey did not make that statement, it was part of a question from Cruz, though he did deny authorizing any leak. New reporting suggests prosecutors believe the “anonymous source” is Professor Daniel Richman, a Comey friend who did leak details of a 2017 meeting between Comey and Trump. But that leak had nothing to do with the Clinton probe, and Richman at the time didn’t work at the FBI. Confused? A jury certainly will be.

Trump doesn’t care if this case flops, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. “As much as he’d like to send Comey to the big house,” his primary goal is to put his perceived tormentors “through the same wringer of legal process” they put him through after 2017. And Comey is just the appetizer, said Tal Axelrod and Zachary Basu in Axios. Trump has ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff. Former Trump national security adviser turned critic John Bolton is being investigated over his handling of classified documents. And Trump said last week that he “would think” the DOJ is investigating former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who replaced Comey in 2017. But Trump won’t rest until Bondi indicts George Soros, former president Barack Obama, and the other “crown jewels of the MAGA retribution agenda.”

This “is not just payback,” said David Frum in The Atlantic. Terrified of Democrats reclaiming the House in next year’s midterms, Trump wants to “frighten opponents away from the political process.” He’s using troops to intimidate voters in blue cities and ginned-up indictments to threaten Democratic mega-donors like Soros and Reid Hoffman. Then there’s the Supreme Court, said Ian Millhiser in Vox. By indicting James Comey, once a top Republican lawyer in Washington, he’s sending a message that neither party affiliation nor prior service offers any protection. He wants the court’s conservative majority to understand that if they try to restrain his authoritarian impulses, “the justices themselves could be next.”