There are times when I miss practicing law, because — right now — there are few more important posts for defending the rule of law and the integrity of the American system of justice than on James Comey’s defense team.
Let’s be clear — perfectly clear — about what happened last week. On Thursday, a federal grand jury, acting on the urging of President Trump’s Department of Justice, indicted Comey, the former director of the F.B.I. This indictment was the culmination of a transparently vindictive campaign by Trump to get revenge on his political enemies, no matter the facts or the law.
Let’s rewind the clock to May 2017. At the time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Trump was furious that he was implicated. Trump reportedly demanded that aides speak out in his defense and was so angry that he was screaming at television clips about the investigation.
While Trump has spent years denigrating the “Russia hoax,” it’s important to remember that there was already evidence of serious misconduct on Trump’s team. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned after he misled Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, had to resign in the middle of the campaign in part because of his own lucrative ties to Russian-allied leaders in Ukraine.
The stated justification for firing Comey was his alleged mishandling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for government business. The memorandum from Rod Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, that recommended Comey’s termination outlined a series of complaints about Comey’s decisions, both to publicly discuss the results of the F.B.I.’s investigation and to publicly announce the reopening of the investigation in October 2016, just days before the election.
For Trump, however, this justification was unquestionably a pretext. Days after Comey was fired, Trump told NBC News that he had intended to fire Comey, “regardless” of the Department of Justice’s recommendation, and the reason was the Russia investigation. “When I decided to just do it,” he told NBC’s Lester Holt, “I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”
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