Thursday’s charges against James Comey follow a tumultuous week that echoed Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, amid the heart of Watergate in 1973.
This time, the federal attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert resigned after refusing to bring politically motivated charges against Donald Trump’s enemies, so the president railed to his attorney general, Pam Bondi, in a social media post about inaction against Mr. Comey. A shockingly inexperienced interim U.S. attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was appointed and Mr. Comey indicted. Mr. Trump declared in another post that we got “JUSTICE IN AMERICA!”
We have seen much debate over the merits and timing of a legal case against Mr. Comey, but any such discussion misses the most important point: We don’t want to live in a country where the president of the United States dictates, publicly or privately, who should be targeted by federal prosecutors and then pressures any prosecutor unwilling to bring said politically motivated charges. The Justice Department and the attorney general are supposed to keep an arm’s length distance from the president, not be his personal score settlers.
The fact that it’s possible to predict the next target — presidential rantings indicate that it could be John Bolton, Letitia James or Adam Schiff — shows how corrupted this usually independent process has become.
I have been critical of Mr. Comey for years. I believe that as director he did grave damage to the reputation of the F.B.I. and that he bears no small responsibility for the election of Mr. Trump in 2016. In the years since his infamous news conference exonerating and excoriating Hillary Clinton and his subsequent firing by Mr. Trump after he refused to drop the F.B.I. investigation of the former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, Mr. Comey has managed to alienate nearly everyone on the left and the right.
But over many years Mr. Comey served his country, and in however flawed a way, he put his efforts at the service of institutions — the F.B.I., the Justice Department — built and sustained to serve the American people, not the president’s whims.
There is no small irony in the fact that it was the federal prosecutors of the Eastern District of Virginia who led the indictment of Mr. Comey — one of the Justice Department’s most storied and respected offices, where Mr. Comey himself did some of the most memorable work of his own prosecutorial career, including leading the delicate and politically sensitive prosecution of the bombers of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.
Thursday’s indictment, which accuses Mr. Comey of making false statements and obstructing justice, marks a much less proud and altogether darker chapter for the Eastern District. Ms. Halligan, who served as the president’s own lawyer, lacked prosecutorial experience before this week and until days ago was a White House official tasked with rooting out “woke” ideology at the Smithsonian Institution, brought the charges against Mr. Comey just days before a statute of limitations would expire. This came even after the career prosecutors in her office recommended against the case, saying it was too weak to meet Justice Department standards.
It seems as though Mr. Trump would actually praise much of Mr. Comey’s work in the Eastern District of Virginia today, in light of Mr. Trump’s assault against street crime in Democratic-led blue cities. When Mr. Comey was a young rising star leading the Eastern District prosecutors in Richmond, Va., in the late 1990s, one of his proudest accomplishments was an operation known as Project Exile. There, prosecutors threw the full weight of the U.S. government against street criminals to arrest a stubbornly high local homicide rate, and it worked spectacularly: In three years, Richmond’s homicide rate was halved.
A decade after Mr. Comey left that role, after he had scaled the Justice Department’s heights to serve as deputy attorney general in the years after Sept. 11, 2001, he went to work in the private sector at Lockheed Martin and a plaque honoring Project Exile decorated his walls.
Step by step, action by action, Mr. Trump has been trying to turn the Justice Department and the F.B.I. into political weapons that target whom he tells them to. The weaponization of federal criminal charges against political enemies stands as one of the most alarming signs of Mr. Trump’s creeping authoritarian tendencies.
Mr. Trump’s future plans are worryingly clear. Hours before the Comey charges became public, he signed a presidential memorandum that outlined how he hopes the full weight of the federal government will be turned against domestic terror groups. The sweeping order so twists the definition of “domestic terror” that it is likely the intent could be to sweep up progressive activist groups, think tanks, their funders (the MAGA bête noire George Soros appears a likely target) and groups like the League of Women Voters.
Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, stood in the Oval Office for the announcement on Thursday and promised, “We are properly going to chase them down like the domestic terrorists that they are,” and added that the full might of the bureau’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces would be used to “root out this new evil.” His comments all but admit that the F.B.I. will ignore what’s known as the Attorney General Guidelines, which prohibit investigations based solely on protected First Amendment activity.
The weak case against Mr. Comey will almost surely lead nowhere. In targeting him, Mr. Trump has picked someone who is many things he is not: meticulous, careful and prone to careful documentation. When the I.R.S. previously — and suspiciously — audited Mr. Comey and his wife during Mr. Trump’s first term, the examination found that Mr. Comey had in fact conservatively overpaid his taxes. The Comeys got a $347 refund from the I.R.S.
But the success of the indictment is not meant to be legal. It’s political — an attempt to muddy the reputation of ethical public servants who have stood in Mr. Trump’s way, to destroy their lives and careers with expensive legal bills, and to serve as a warning to anyone who might resist Mr. Trump’s attempts to secure authoritarian power in the future.
It is, in that sense, about the most corrupt attack on the rule of law imaginable. This past week would have surely led to impeachment proceedings against any other U.S. president. That Mr. Trump is likely to plow forward should chill every American.
Garrett M. Graff is a journalist, a historian and the author of “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb.”
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