Donald Trump and James Comey have got to stop meeting like this.
On May 9, 2017, President Trump fired Comey as director of the F.B.I., a dramatic, norm-busting move whose consequences would dominate much of the president’s first term. Days later, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election — to pick up, essentially, the work that the F.B.I. had begun. Since then, Trump’s vendetta against Comey and all things “Russia, Russia, Russia” has never ended.
As news of Comey’s firing broke that day in 2017, I happened to be arriving at a Washington book party, an event packed with veteran political journalists and former senior government officials, including a White House chief of staff or two. I remember how shocked people felt; there was a sense that an important line had been crossed.
Eight years and way too many lines later, Trump has seen fit to cross an especially bright one, and once again he’s done it to step on Comey. Thursday’s indictment of Comey by a federal grand jury — on one count of making a false statement in a 2020 Senate hearing and another of obstructing that proceeding — came despite the objections of career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, who had not found sufficient evidence to charge Comey.
No matter: The White House soon replaced a reluctant U.S. attorney with an inexperienced loyalist, and Trump pressured the attorney general herself to move against his perceived political enemies. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!) OVER NOTHING,” he said in a message to Pam Bondi last week, adding that they’re all “guilty as hell” and that JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Shortly after the indictment became public, Trump gloated on social media: “JUSTICE IN AMERICA!”
This is but the latest step in Trump’s second-term quest for political retribution, and the president has already said there will be more indictments to come. Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, called the action against Comey a “dangerous abuse of power,” stressing that “our system depends on prosecutors making decisions based on evidence and the law, not on the personal grudges of a politician.”
But really, the most eloquent case against indicting Comey — against using the Department of Justice as an instrument of personal revenge — comes courtesy of Trump himself. And it comes, of all places, from the justifications Trump provided for firing Comey eight years ago.
In his brief letter dismissing the F.B.I. director — weirdly, it was hand delivered to the bureau headquarters by Trump’s longtime bodyguard, even though Comey was in Los Angeles — the president explained that he was relying on the written advice of Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, and Rosenstein, the Justice Department’s No. 2. “I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately,” Trump wrote, attaching the documents from both Sessions and Rosenstein.
So, what did these two top officials say when arguing for Comey’s removal?
Rosenstein criticized Comey’s behavior during the F.B.I. investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, when the director gave a high-profile news conference in 2016 criticizing Clinton for being “extremely careless” in using a private server for government work but declined to bring charges against her. Rosenstein said Comey had “gratuitously” released “derogatory information” about Clinton and had “laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial.” He called it a “textbook example” of what federal officials are trained not to do.
He was talking about Comey nearly a decade ago, but he could be talking about Trump today.
“The goal of a federal criminal investigation is not to announce our thoughts at a press conference,” Rosenstein continued. “The goal is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to justify a federal criminal prosecution, then allow a federal prosecutor who exercises authority delegated by the attorney general to make a prosecutorial decision.”
He was talking about Comey nearly a decade ago, but he could be talking about Trump today.
Rosenstein cited the views of several top-ranking Justice Department officials to support his recommendation. Judge Laurence Silberman, who was deputy attorney general during the Ford administration, said that “it is not the bureau’s responsibility to opine on whether a matter should be prosecuted.” Rosenstein quoted Jamie Gorelick and Larry Thompson, who served as deputy attorneys general under President Clinton and George W. Bush, as saying that Comey had violated his obligation to “preserve, protect and defend” the traditions of the Justice Department, and had instead engaged in “a kind of reality TV of federal criminal investigation” that was “antithetical to the interests of justice.”
They were talking about Comey nearly a decade ago, but they could be talking about Trump today.
Sessions, whose one-paragraph letter recommending Comey’s removal relied heavily on Rosenstein’s memo, wrote eloquently about the principles that should guide his department. “As attorney general,” he said, “I am committed to a high level of discipline, integrity and the rule of law to the Department of Justice — an institution that I deeply respect.” In calling for a “fresh start” at the F.B.I., he said that “it is essential that this Department of Justice reaffirm its commitment to longstanding principles that ensure the integrity and fairness of federal investigations and prosecutions.” The F.B.I. director, Sessions wrote, must set “the right example for our law enforcement officials and others in the department.”
He was talking about Comey nearly a decade ago, but he could be talking about Trump today.
Of course, Sessions and Rosenstein were laying out the most respectable rationale possible for Comey’s firing. All manner of alternative explanations would soon emerge, including from Trump and from top aides: that he’d been thinking about “this Russia thing” when he decided to dismiss the director, that Comey was “a real nut job,” that he’d thought about firing Comey as far back as November 2016, before he was even in office and long before any convenient memos arrived from the Justice Department.
But even these face-saving arguments from Sessions and Rosenstein remain instructive. The two men were setting exacting standards for law enforcement in America, for procedure and principle, and warning that the wrong leader could blow right through them.
They weren’t wrong. And if these standards apply to the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, they should apply to the president of the United States even more.
The president should not gratuitously lay out his view of the events surrounding a criminal inquiry, creating a reality TV rendition of an investigation. The president should not sound off on social media on the guilt or innocence of individuals but instead allow the Justice Department to do its work. The president should not let his personal resentments undermine the integrity and fairness that should guide the Department of Justice. And it is the president, above all, who must set the right example for the rule of law in America.
As Trump concluded in his 2017 letter to Comey, “it is essential that we find new leadership for the F.B.I. that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission.” He was talking of Comey nearly a decade ago, but he could be talking about himself — and his presidency — today.
Trump and Comey will always be intertwined in the history of this period, and not just because of Clinton and Russia and Mueller and the rest. Together, they tell the story of the politicizing of justice in America. When Trump proclaimed his case for Comey’s dismissal in 2017, he unwittingly challenged his own calls for Comey’s indictment in 2025. It would almost be literary, if it were not so real.
To cry hypocrisy almost feels quaint. A president with little regard for the rule of law, except for how the law can be made to strengthen his own rule, is beyond shame or embarrassment. Invoking high principle one day and violating it the next is simply the cost of doing business, and, to Trump, the cost seems low.
After leaving his post, Comey published a book — a somewhat self-serving one, as I wrote at the time — about ethical leadership in public life. In it, he recalled his days going after Mafia families as U.S. attorney in Manhattan. “As I found myself thrust into the Trump orbit, I once again was having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob,” he wrote in 2018. “The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview.”
Comey was talking about Trump nearly a decade ago, and he could be talking about him, even more so, today.
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Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
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