I was just about to say goodbye to Angel Ironica and go back to making bread when the Department of Injustice decided to indict former FBI Director James Comey.
Talk about irony! Say goodbye to the highly principled—dare I say Republican—Erik Siebert, who was recently picked by President Donald Trump himself to serve as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Siebert was tasked with investigating Donald Trump’s sworn enemies, New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. James, you may recall, won a massive civil fraud case against Trump in New York.
But, having reviewed all the evidence that claimed James had committed mortgage fraud—by allegedly lying that a vacation condo was actually her principal residence—Siebert refused to seek indictment.
Why? As ABC News reports:
Prosecutors have not yet been able to produce evidence that James knowingly filled out the power of attorney form incorrectly to influence the bank that issued the mortgage, said sources familiar with the investigation’s findings thus far.
James has denied wrongdoing, and her lawyer Abbe Lowell has criticized the criminal referral as ‘three pages of stale, threadbare allegations’ that he called ‘the next salvo in President Trump’s revenge tour against Attorney General James … As we have repeatedly said, any impartial and non-political inquiry would conclude Attorney General James did not violate any laws managing her properties.’
Then, as The New York Times adds, Siebert refused a similar request to indict James Comey, choosing to resign rather than violate his oath of office:
The Times writes:
Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation … Mr. Siebert informed prosecutors in his office of his resignation through an email hours after the president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he wanted him removed because two Democratic senators from Virginia had approved of his nomination.
‘When I saw that he got two senators, two gentlemen that are bad news as far as I’m concerned — when I saw that he got approved by those two men, I said, pull it, because he can’t be any good,’ Mr. Trump said. The president did not mention that he nominated Mr. Siebert only after the two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, had already written Mr. Trump praising him. When asked if he would fire Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump responded, ‘Yeah, I want him out.’ Ms. James, he told reporters, was ‘very guilty of something.’ Mr. Trump later disputed that Mr. Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, ‘He didn’t quit, I fired him!’
[Emphasis added.]
In a follow-up piece, The New York Times notes:
The chaos of the investigation into Mr. Comey tore through the close-knit staff like a whirlwind, with career prosecutors scrambling for news about their leadership and marching orders. At one point on Sept. 19, about a dozen of them marched up to Mr. Siebert’s office to demand answers about his status, as rumors of his departure swirled. Quitting, he told them, ‘was the easiest thing; he had ever done in his long career at the department,’ according to a person who witnessed the exchange.
The Times adds this critically significant information:
In early September, prosecutors from Mr. Siebert’s office subpoenaed Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia law professor and close adviser to Mr. Comey, in connection with an investigation into whether the former F.B.I. director lied about authorizing Mr. Richman to leak information. Mr. Richman’s statements to prosecutors were not helpful in their efforts to build a case, according to people familiar with the matter. And Mr. Siebert began expressing serious doubts about the case, which quickly made their way up the chain of command … On Friday, Sept. 19, [the President] told reporters he wanted Mr. Siebert to leave. The prosecutor, who had hoped to find another job in the department, knew that time was up and resigned, according to officials in his office who requested anonymity to avoid retribution.
Thus far, only one staff member has quit: Troy A. Edwards Jr., a prosecutor who is married to one of Mr. Comey’s daughters. Mr. Edwards was present at the courthouse as the grand jury deliberated, telling people there that he intended to resign if an indictment was returned.
He made good with a single-sentence letter to Ms. Halligan, informing her that he was stepping down ‘to uphold my oath to the Constitution and the country.’
[Emphasis added.]
Perhaps now you understand why I begged Angel Ironica to stick around. We know Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a brain worm. We know as well that President Donald Trump has convinced himself that he can tell pregnant women what they should take for pain management, that he is now is qualified to reconfigure the schedule for childhood vaccinations. And given these developments, it is reasonable to wonder how much disbelief we would have to suspend to actually trust that Pam Bondi knows anything about enforcing the law.
Meanwhile, she is doing everything in her power to prevent Tom Homan from being prosecuted and everything to keep the public from learning exactly which powerful men were a party to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking endeavors.
It is pretty obvious in Truskmumpia that many people are above the law and that Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice is complicit in protecting those, including the president, who abuse their positions of power. Just as clearly, this Department of Justice—having fired Assistant Attorney General Maurene Comey and made life miserable for U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert—is committed not to pursuing justice but getting rid of those officials who actually care about the facts and not the politics.
Just a reminder: Unlike Pam Bondi and Donald Trump, Jim Comey has risked his life going after the Mafia and real terrorists. Now onto his indictment.
As the UK Guardian points out, because Erik Siebert would not go forward:
Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide, was sworn in on Monday as the interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia … The appointment of Halligan, who has no prosecutorial experience and was the most junior lawyer on Trump’s personal legal team, alarmed current and former prosecutors about political pressure to indict the president’s political enemies regardless of the strength of the evidence.
The first few days in any new job are always hard, but Thursday was especially tough for Lindsey Halligan … She had to navigate an unfamiliar courthouse, make her first-ever appearance in a criminal case and, on top of all that, indict one of President Trump’s enemies … At one point, she entered the wrong courtroom. When she found the right one, she stood on the wrong side of the judge, then appeared confused about the paperwork she just had signed.
But she accomplished the third task — the one that mattered most to her boss — securing a criminal indictment against Mr. Comey, the former F.B.I. director. The indictment marked the culmination of an extraordinary series of White House actions that have, in the view of many Justice Department veterans, stripped away remaining legal and procedural restraints that might have prevented Mr. Trump from directing federal law enforcement to humiliate, investigate and prosecute the people he hates.
Yet another case of loyalty outweighing competence. Halligan had proved her reliability in the documents case, the case where Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon torpedoed any attempt to hold Donald Trump accountable for stealing top-secret documents regarding national security from the White House and National Archives and storing them in his unsecured Mara-a-Lago bathroom and ballroom. Then she sanitized the Smithsonian to protect us against any inflammatory focus on slavery or any other woke-induced stain on MAGA’s idea of America.
Now Halligan has the opportunity to do what a principled DOJ attorney would not do: prosecute a man whose main crime was informing Donald Trump he would not look the other way about the misdeeds of Michael Flynn or the reality of Russian interference in the 2016 election and the possibility that Putin had incriminating evidence against him. No, “Russia, Russia, Russia” was not a hoax.
I know it is hard to find a Democrat who has any fond feelings for James Comey. As for me, having read his book, I always thought he deserved better. Now, ironically—thank you, Angel—Comey is being prosecuted by Donald Trump precisely because he has always insisted on pushing aside politics to do what he believed the law required. Bad judgment, perhaps, by publicly acknowledging the department’s decision that finding the Anthony Weiner laptop required them to re-open the Clinton investigation. But there, too, he opted for transparency at the expense of whatever effects that might have on the election.
And while Democrats have always been reluctant to acknowledge that Hillary had, in effect, broken the law by installing a private server with access to sensitive government documents in her home, Comey refused to look the other way. Fact is, he would have been criticized for saying nothing if it was later revealed he had hid that information from the public. At least Comey has remained consistent.
Meanwhile, even legal experts are not exactly sure what exactly James Comey is being charged with. And Lindsey Halligan’s indictment only created more confusion:
So what exactly happened when newly minted United States Attorney Lindsey Halligan took her indictment before a grand jury? Preet Bahara, former United States attorney for the Southern District of New York—fired, you may remember, by President Donald Trump—explains that the process is very clearly weighted in the favor of the government:
So, look, the grand jury is something that appears in the Constitution … If a person in the United States is charged federally, that person has the right to be adjudicated, to have, you know, by a standard of probable cause, be likely to have committed some crime, some violation of a specified federal statute … it’s a pretty one-sided process. So, you know, there the joke comes … You can indict a ham sandwich because you can go into the grand jury, you can present, you know, not only one-sided evidence, but hearsay evidence. And if your goal is just to get the indictment and that’s all you care about and … you’re not worried about ultimately getting a conviction before a unanimous jury at a much, much, much higher standard beyond a reasonable doubt, then if you have some kernel of something and you don’t present exculpatory evidence or other points of view or witnesses who disagree with your theory of the case and all you need is a majority of a 23 person grand jury … there’s no cross-examination, there’s no judge, there’s, there’s no rules of evidence, generally speaking, that apply. It shouldn’t be that hard.
[Emphasis added.]
But we are talking about inexperienced Lindsey Halligan here, and while “it shouldn’t be that hard,” it certainly was not that easy.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Lindsey Vaala expressed confusion and surprise at some points during the seven-minute court session when a federal grand jury impaneled in Alexandria, Virginia, returned the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey Thursday night. According to a transcript of the proceedings obtained by CBS News, Judge Vaala asked the newly named interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan — a former Trump personal lawyer — why there were two versions of the indictment.
A majority of the grand jury that reviewed the Comey matter voted not to charge him with one of the three counts presented by prosecutors, according to a form that was signed by the grand jury’s foreperson and filed in court.
CBS continues:
He was indicted on two other counts — making false statements to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding — after 14 of 23 jurors voted in favor of them, the foreperson told the judge. But two versions of the indictment were published on the case docket: one with the dropped third count, and one without. The transcript reveals why this occurred.
‘So this has never happened before. I’ve been handed two documents that are in the Mr. Comey case that are inconsistent with one another,’ Vaala said to Halligan. ‘There seems to be a discrepancy. They’re both signed by the (grand jury) foreperson.’ And she noted that one document did not clearly indicate what the grand jury had decided. ‘The one that says it’s a failure to concur in an indictment, it doesn’t say with respect to one count … It looks like they failed to concur across all three counts, so I’m a little confused as to why I was handed two things with the same case number that are inconsistent.’
Halligan initially responded that she hadn’t seen that version of the indictment. ‘So I only reviewed the one with the two counts that our office redrafted when we found out about the two — two counts that were true billed, and I signed that one. I did not see the other one. I don’t know where that came from,’ Halligan told the judge. Vaala responded, ‘You didn’t see it?’ And Halligan again told her, ‘I did not see that one.’ Vaala seemed surprised: ‘So your office didn’t prepare the indictment that they —’. Halligan then replied, ‘No, no, no — I — no, I prepared three counts. I only signed the one — the two-count (indictment). I don’t know which one with three counts you have in your hands.’ ‘Okay. It has your signature on it,’ Vaala told Halligan, who responded, ‘Okay. Well.’
Vaala also noted that the court session began unusually late, at 6:47 p.m. Thursday evening, telling the grand jurors ‘I don’t think we’ve ever met this late’ as she thanked them for their service.
Now, we—and especially James Comey—do not know what Lindsey Halligan told the grand jury, and we do not know the specific details of what exactly the government alleges to be the false statements that James Comey told Congress on September 30, 2020, or what exactly they believe James Comey did to make him guilty. The New York Times tries to answer this critical question:
According to the Times:
… the details of the accusation against him remain murky because the indictment is extremely sparse … The false statement charge asserts that in appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, 2020, Mr. Comey told a U.S. senator that he ‘had not “authorized someone else at the F.B.I. to be an anonymous source in news reports” regarding an F.B.I. investigation concerning’ an unnamed person. But in fact, the indictment says, Mr. Comey had authorized someone to do so. The obstruction charge is even vaguer. It asserts that Mr. Comey made ‘false and misleading statements’ before the committee, but offers no details.
[Emphasis added.]
In fact, Comey testified about these matters at two different times. On May 3, 2017, Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his and the FBI’s actions during the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the investigation into Russia and the 2016 election. Then in Comey’s 2020 testimony before the Senate, Sen. Ted Cruz clumsily and confusedly referred to what Comey had said in 2017. And so Comey’s response to those questions from Senator Ted Cruz is at the heart of this indictment.
Now, here is how Jim Geraghty of the highly conservative National Review explains it:
To understand why a federal grand jury indicted Comey on Thursday, we must go all the way back to the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign.
On October 30, 2016, Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett wrote an article with the headline, ‘FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe.’ The most consequential revelation in that story was that the FBI had begun an investigation into the Clinton Foundation, run by Bill and Hillary Clinton:
New details show that senior law-enforcement officials repeatedly voiced skepticism of the strength of the evidence in a bureau investigation of the Clinton Foundation, sought to condense what was at times a sprawling cross-country effort, and, according to some people familiar with the matter, told agents to limit their pursuit of the case. The probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity.
Some investigators grew frustrated, viewing FBI leadership as uninterested in probing the charity, these people said. Others involved disagreed sharply, defending FBI bosses and saying [FBI deputy director Andrew] McCabe in particular was caught between an increasingly acrimonious fight for control between the Justice Department and FBI agents pursuing the Clinton Foundation case.
Up until then, Comey had refused to confirm or deny whether the bureau was investigating the Clinton Foundation, even in testimony to Congress. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General conducted a thorough investigation about the leak and found ‘FBI text messages by McCabe’s then-Special Counsel that reflected that she and the then-Assistant Director for Public Affairs (“AD/OPA”) had been in contact with Barrett on October 27 and 28, 2016.’ The Office of Inspector General interviewed McCabe several times and concluded in its report that ‘McCabe lacked candor when he stated that he told Comey on October 31, 2016, that he had authorized the disclosure to the WSJ.’ That OIG report was damning of McCabe and relatively exonerating of Comey:
Comey told [the OIG] that, prior to the article’s publication, he did not have any discussions with McCabe regarding disclosure of the August 12 PADAG call.
According to Comey, he discussed the issue with McCabe after the article was published, and at that time McCabe ‘definitely did not tell me that he authorized’ the disclosure of the PADAG call. Comey said that McCabe gave him the exact opposite impression:
When asked by the OIG about whether he would have approved the disclosure about the PADAG call to the WSJ, Comey stated: ‘[S]o just to make sure there’s no fuzz on it, I did not authorize this. I would not have authorized this. If someone says that I did, then we ought to have another conversation because I, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.’
For what it’s worth, the OIG report concluded, ‘McCabe did not tell Comey on or around October 31 (or at any other time) that he (McCabe) had authorized the disclosure of information about the CF Investigation to the WSJ. Had McCabe done so, we believe that Comey would have objected to the disclosure.’
Fast forward to Comey’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, September 30, 2020:
Senator Ted Cruz: Let’s shift to another topic. On May 3rd, 2017, in this committee, Chairman Grassley asked you point blank, ‘Have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?’ You responded under oath, ‘Never.’ He then asked you, ‘Have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton administration?’ You responded again under oath, ‘No.’ Now, as you know, Mr. McCabe, who works for you, has publicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it. Now, what Mr. McCabe is saying and what you testified to this committee cannot both be true. One or the other is false. Who’s telling the truth?
Mr. Comey: I can only speak to my testimony. I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017.
Senator Cruz: So, your testimony is you’ve never authorized anyone to leak? And Mr. McCabe, if he says contrary, is not telling the truth, is that correct?
Mr. Comey: Again, I’m not going to characterize Andy’s testimony, but mine is the same today.
Keep in mind, the indictment of Comey yesterday has next to nothing to do with ‘Russiagate,’ or targeting Trump, or his criticism of Trump. Last night, President Trump raged on Truth Social that Comey was a ‘dirty cop’ and that he had been indicted on ‘various illegal and unlawful acts.’
Geraghty leaves out Cruz’s last very gratuitous and extremely ironic remarks:
Senator Cruz: All right, I’m going to make a final point because my time has expired. This investigation of the president was corrupt. The FBI and the Department of Justice was politicized and weaponized. And in my opinion, there are only two possibilities. That you were deliberately corrupt or willfully incompetent. And I don’t believe you were incompetent. This has done severe damage to the professionals and the honorable men and women at the FBI because law enforcement should not be used as a political weapon. And that is the legacy you have left.
Ted Cruz faithfully describes exactly what he and MAGA has helped make happen. He, Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, and Kash Patel have indeed politicized and weaponized the FBI.
The indictment of Jim Comey is, in fact, the ultimate act of the immoral politicization and weaponization of governmental power, and Patel’s FBI and Bondi’s Department of Justice and the president himself are all co-conspirators. A careful reading of Jim Geraghty reveals that the Office of Inspector General, having investigated and interviewed both McCabe and Comey, concluded that Comey was not aware that McCabe or his assistant had spoken about the investigation to The Wall Street Journal until the article was published and would not have approved of what McCabe had done.
So much for what Comey had told Congress. Now let’s turn to yet another highly conservative National Review commentator, former prosecutor and FOX News contributor Andrew McCarthy. McCarthy looks in detail at how the government is trying to send the former director of the FBI to jail.
McCarthy writes:
The Trump Justice Department’s false-statement indictment against former FBI Director James Comey is so ill-conceived that the longer one analyzes it, the worse it gets. Plus, it is incoherently drafted, such that it fails to fulfill an indictment’s constitutional purpose; namely, to put the defendant on notice of what the government alleges he has done to violate the law.
As I observed after the charges were made public, the remaining false-statement charge (as opposed to the one the grand jury rejected) is unclear, to the point that one had to pore over the transcript of Comey’s Senate testimony and consult press reports to decipher the supposedly illegal conduct …
The Justice Department … charged the case under the broad false-statements statute … Section 1001, like Section 1621, requires the heightened criminal-intent standard that the false statement be willful. This means the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant not only made the statement deliberately but with knowledge that the statement was untrue and that his conduct was unlawful. That is significant in this case because the allegation is so vague that analysts knowledgeable about the criminal law and Comey’s testimony are still speculating about what specific statements are at issue.
Now, I’ll repeat what I outlined on Friday about what the indictment charges. Comey is said to have lied to the Senate
by falsely stating to a U.S. Senator … that he … had not ‘authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports’ regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1. [Emphasis added]
I highlighted ‘authorized’ because what Senator Ted Cruz was specifically asking Comey about was whether he’d authorized McCabe to leak investigative information to the Wall Street Journal. That would be an invalid basis for a false-statement charge because no one, not even McCabe, claims that Comey authorized McCabe to orchestrate that leak. That is to say, (1) McCabe concedes that he did not speak with Comey about the leak until after the WSJ published the story at issue (about the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation), and (2) the Justice Department’s inspector general found that McCabe was lying when he claimed to have told Comey about his role in the leak …
The bottom line is: It’s inconceivable that a false-statement charge against Comey could rest on an allegation that he authorized McCabe to leak to the WSJ. There is no evidence of that, period. The Trump Justice Department, including novice prosecutor Lindsey Halligan, clearly knows this. That is no doubt why prosecutors added a second paragraph in hope of saving the case, to wit:
That statement [that Comey had not ‘authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports’] was false, because, as [Comey] then and there knew, he in fact had authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1.
McCarthy continues his analysis:
There is no doubt that ‘PERSON 1’ is Hillary Clinton. We know that because of the false-statement count that the grand jury rejected …That proposed charge referred to ‘PERSON 1’s approval of a plan concerning PERSON 2 and the 2016 Presidential election.’ This was a reference to Hillary Clinton’s (PERSON 1’s) strategy to frame Trump (PERSON 2) as a Kremlin mole. The identity of PERSON 1 is crucial. Remember, Comey is charged with having authorized an FBI person to be an anonymous source in news reports ‘regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1’ (emphasis added). The leak therefore has to be about Hillary
That brings us to PERSON 3. There is a strained theory that PERSON 3 is McCabe, because McCabe is central to the incident Cruz questioned Comey about — the Clinton Foundation leak to the WSJ. That doesn’t make sense. For the reasons already detailed, Comey did not authorize McCabe to leak information to the WSJ. Furthermore, McCabe is the FBI official described in the indictment (excerpted above) as ‘someone else at the FBI,’ so there would be no reason to denominate him as ‘PERSON 3.’
This lends credence to the speculation that PERSON 3 is Richman, the Columbia professor and former federal prosecutor. (He’s a longtime friend of Comey’s and mine from when we all started out as Southern District of New York prosecutors in the 1980s.) When Comey was FBI director, he hired Richman as a consultant — technically, a ‘special government employee’ for the FBI — for a little over a year and a half, from June 2015 to February 2017.
Let’s bear in mind that two things have to be proven true for the indictment to stand. First, the leak Comey allegedly authorized has to be about Hillary Clinton. Second, Comey has to have authorized ‘someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports.’
There is no doubt that, in May 2017, Comey authorized Richman to be an anonymous source for the New York Times regarding Comey’s 2017 conversations with President Trump. But (1) at that point, Richman was not ‘someone else at the FBI’ (his consulting contract having ended in February), and (b) in any event, the memos Comey leaked through Richman were not about Clinton …
Richman has publicly conceded that, upon being contacted by a New York Times reporter, he discussed this subject. He maintains, nevertheless, that he does not believe that he disclosed any intelligence (he has said the Times reporter seemed to know more about the matter than he did). More to the point, he says that Comey never authorized him to be an anonymous source for the media regarding that intelligence — to the contrary, he has told government investigators that Comey regarded this intelligence as extremely sensitive and not to be discussed. The government appears to have no evidence to rebut this claim; certainly, the DOJ has not claimed otherwise in the indictment.
To summarize, then: When Richman was an FBI official, he was not authorized by Comey to discuss Hillary Clinton (i.e., Lynch’s possibly being compromised regarding the Clinton investigation). And when Richman did leak for Comey, he was not an FBI official, and the leak was not about Hillary Clinton.
To summarize, there is no provable false-statements case against Comey. Regardless of whether PERSON 3 is deemed to be McCabe or Richman, there is no factual basis for a claim that Comey authorized one of them to disclose to the media any FBI investigative information regarding Hillary Clinton.
Moreover, Cruz’s questions to Comey patently pertained to McCabe. Ergo, Comey was not on notice that this questioning might pertain to whether he’d authorized other FBI officials to leak information about Clinton. Quite apart from the lack of evidence that Comey authorized such leaking, there is no way the government could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Senator Cruz was asking Comey about someone other than McCabe, much less that Comey understood that Cruz was doing so and willfully lied about it.
The indictment is inadequately pled and factually without foundation. It should be dismissed.
[Emphasis added.]
Now I want to raise the issues of selective and vindictive prosecution and the trampling of Comey’s right to a fair trial before an impartial jury. Witness the frantic attempt of multiple members of the administration, including the president, to publicly condemn Jim Comey before the case ever goes to trial, as well as their determination to violate the principle of the presumption of innocence. Here’s Cornell University’s discussion of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution:
Here’s President Trump publicly pressuring the attorney general to indict Comey. Not only does the president obliterate the presumption of innocence when he declares Comey guilty as hell, but he demeans the principled prosecutor he himself appointed for admitting that there was no winnable case here. Then, he basically tells the attorney general to appoint former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan to replace Seibert:
If that is not enough, convicted felon that he is, Donald Trump insists on tarnishing Comey’s life in law enforcement:
Not surprisingly, Attorney General Pam Bondi has as little respect for the presumption of innocence as her boss, whom she quickly placates:
Here is what former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weisman, far less conservative than the folks at the National Review, he told Sarah Longwell:
The way I think about it is what are the things that are separating us from Russia? … almost everyone who’s listening to this, you know, grew up in America and you’re thinking, well, we’re not like Russia. Um, and you know, you can add lots of other countries, but I’m going to take them as an example. And one is, you don’t think of show trials, you think of checks and balances. You think the judiciary, you think of the Congress, you think that you can’t just charge anyone you want. That there are grand juries and trial juries and judges. And there’s all of this legal process. And the Department of Justice post-Watergate operates to care about facts and law. And you don’t just for instance have a policy which is we’re only going to go get about getting Democrats or you know vice versa. to the Democrats when they’re in power saying, ‘Oh, we’re only going to go after Republicans.’ All of that is like you think, ‘Well, this is a given. We’re a rule of law country.’ And that sort of political corruption that you see around the globe is something that doesn’t happen here because … even though we’re flawed, and there’s lots of flaws in our history, we are, we aspire to be this shining city on the hill. This is um this is gone. um this is creating the Department of Justice as a loaded gun to be used politically. And this one of the things, I, is my big take-home: is it doesn’t matter if the Comey case is a total loser for Donald Trump because I think it will be. It still works for him in the same way that the executive orders about the law firms still works for him. Because it instills fear in people and it shuts them up. Because you’re sitting there going, ‘Oh, here’s a guy who has got so much control over every lever of power. He can aim it at anyone and cause incredible damage. Better to be silent.’ And so, you know, I think James Comey is going to fight like hell, and all signs are this is an incredibly weak indictment, but I think the damage is done no matter what.
I am no lawyer, but it seems clear to me that there are several factors in Comey’s favor. Start with the fact that Seibert and seemingly every other experienced prosecutor in the office concluded there is no case against Comey—and I am assuming that will come out in the trial. Then I imagine the continuing public attempts of the DOJ and President Trump to smear Comey combine to make a pretty persuasive case for vindictive prosecution and prosecutorial abuse.
Andrew Weisman helped convict Enron. He helped Robert Mueller investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election. If he is worried that we are coming to resemble Russia, you know we are entering an age of lawlessness and disorder. And the Comey indictment is proof.
