Former U.S. Assistant Attorney Andrew McCarthy has once again broken from the party line to blast the “petty” indictment of James Comey.
The former FBI director was indicted by Lindsey Halligan Thursday, days after Donald Trump called for action to be taken against him.
Speaking to Martha MacCallum on Fox News Sunday, McCarthy bashed the move as “lawfare” by Trump—and also said that the case had no chance of conviction.
Comey was indicted for obstructing a congressional investigation and making false statements, based on a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing from September 2020.
Of the charges, McCarthy noted, “Yeah, what amazes me, Martha, is that people seem to think this must be about Russiagate, you know? This must be about how they lied to the FISA court and got the authority to do the surveillance and the whole Trump-Russia collusion nonsense.”
He clarified: “This is not that. This is sort of a petty thing about the Clinton campaign.”
During his 2020 testimony, Comey swore that he didn’t authorize leaks on the investigations into either Hilary Clinton’s private emails or into Trump’s rumored relationship with Russia.
McCarthy added that the case against Comey itself “almost fails as an indictment in that it doesn’t give you notice of what he’s actually done.”
He summarized, “Factually, there’s nothing there.”
McCarthy then theorized that Trump was simply putting Comey through the wringer as a means of revenge for his own legal struggles—and that the president ultimately didn’t care about the final outcome.
“This smacks of wanting to put Comey through the process, which is what lawfare is; the penalty is the process,” he said.
“And I think Trump feels that that’s what was done to him,” McCarthy theorized. “And I don’t think he particularly is that interested in whether Comey ultimately gets convicted or not, he wants to put him through the process.”
McCarthy ended his musing on a wider concern about what this might mean for Trump’s DOJ if the pursuit of targeted process overrides pursuit of penalty.
He explained, “The problem he has is those lawyers at the Justice Department, when they sign off on those pleadings, they have an ethical responsibility to at least bring a case that has a reasonable chance of prevailing, and this is not that case.”
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