In 2017, Deputy Lawyer Common Rod Rosenstein produced a letter purporting to fireside FBI Director James Comey for being too imply to Hillary Clinton.
“The Director laid out his model of the details for the information media as if it had been a closing argument, however with no trial,” he tut-tutted over Comey’s press convention explaining his determination to not prosecute the presidential candidate. “It’s a textbook instance of what federal prosecutors and brokers are taught to not do.”
Eight years later, Trump’s private lawyer indicted James Comey for being imply to Hillary Clinton.
As a result of historical past could not rhyme, nevertheless it does echo … within the stupidest approach attainable.
Then as now, completely nobody was fooled. In 2017, Trump raced to substantiate on tv that he’d fired Comey to finish the investigation into his marketing campaign’s ties to Russia. In 2025, Trump brayed for after which celebrated the costs in opposition to his enemies with out bothering himself an excessive amount of concerning the nature of the supposed crime.
“JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” he screeched on social media, celebrating the indictment of “one of many worst human beings this Nation has ever been uncovered to” for “numerous unlawful and illegal acts.”
The character of these “numerous unlawful and illegal acts” was fully inappropriate. By this morning, the president appears to have found out that “HE LIED!” about one thing, though what he didn’t specify.
“James ‘Soiled Cop’ Comey was a destroyer of lives,” he ranted. “He knew precisely what he was saying, and that it was a really severe and much reaching lie for which a really large value should be paid!”
As of this writing, no invoice of particulars has been docketed, and the general public nonetheless doesn’t know “precisely what he was saying.” The overall consensus is that the “materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent assertion” undergirding the 18 U.S.C. § 1001 cost is Comey’s denial that he’d approved his deputy Andy McCabe to talk to journalists concerning the ongoing investigation of Hillary Clinton.
McCabe spoke off the report to the Wall Road Journal concerning the ongoing FBI inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails for an October 13, 2016 article by Devlin Barrett. He testified that he’d gotten the greenlight from his boss, though it’s attainable to learn what McCabe mentioned as implying that Comey had blessed the disclosure after the very fact. Comey mentioned he didn’t recall that, and a 2018 inspector general’s report urged that Comey’s account was in all probability nearer to the reality. When the DOJ tried to indict McCabe for the lie in 2019, it received no-billed.
In brief, there’ll by no means be a strategy to show past an inexpensive doubt that Comey was mendacity to Congress in 2020 when he mentioned, “I can solely communicate to my testimony. I stand by the testimony.” That’s virtually definitely why Erik Siebert, the extremely competent profession prosecutor Trump put in as US Lawyer for the Japanese District of Virginia, refused to hunt an indictment. However with the clock ticking on the five-year statute of limitations, Trump pushed out Siebert final Friday. By Monday, Trump’s private legal professional Lindsey Halligan, an insurance coverage lawyer from Florida, had been sworn in as his substitute.
Missing any prosecutorial expertise or moral scruple, Halligan raced to indict the president’s enemy, bootstrapping on an obstruction of Congress cost for good measure. The grand jury rejected a 3rd cost involving one other purported false assertion, though Halligan reportedly signed each the rejected and accepted indictments and handed them to the responsibility choose.
The case was assigned to Decide Michael Nachmanoff, a Biden appointee who spent 13 years as a federal public defender in EDVA. The case is ready for arraignment on October 9, the place Halligan will face off in opposition to Patrick Fitzgerald, probably the most storied prosecutors in trendy historical past. Hilarity will little doubt ensue.
The defendant stays defiant.
The best trick the satan ever pulled was making liberals root for James Comey once more. And all it took was breaking the DOJ.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore the place she produces the Legislation and Chaos substack and podcast.
