James Comey has done some things in his career that I didn’t care for and which I suspect you didn’t like either, for what I’m guessing are similar reasons. But those things are irrelevant today. As of Thursday evening, Comey is one more symbol of Donald Trump’s utter contempt for law and decency. To the extent that the United States of America was founded as a nation where the law was more powerful than any individual leader, the sinister indictment of Comey is the ultimate symbol—so far, that is—of Trump’s contempt for the United States of America.
Yes—contempt for the United States of America. This may confuse some Americans, who see Trump constantly wrapping himself in the flag, on some obscene occasions even hugging and kissing it—a Judas kiss from a man who has no understanding of what love of country actually means—and think of him as patriotic. But this is exactly what authoritarian thugs throughout history do. They bathe themselves in flag imagery as they torch the best values that flag represents.
Trump has done many terrible things, has attempted in many ways to place himself above the law. But the Comey indictment is clearly the most egregious. The New York Times, which I’ve criticized in the past for dancing around saying what really needs to be said about Trump in its news columns, actually rose to the occasion this morning in its news analysis piece: “An inexperienced prosecutor loyal to President Trump, in the job for less than a week, filed criminal charges against one of her boss’s most-reviled opponents. She did so not only at Mr. Trump’s direct command, but also against the urging of both her own subordinates and her predecessor, who had just been fired for raising concerns that there was insufficient evidence to indict.”
That inexperienced attorney, whose name you need to commit to memory because it will live in infamy in this country’s history, is Lindsey Halligan. She has never been a prosecutor. She was an insurance lawyer in Florida. She chased tornadoes. And it almost goes without saying that she represented insurance companies against ordinary people. Trump somehow spotted her one day when he was golfing and she was playing tennis (and, oh, she’s a former Miss Colorado), and he invited her onto his legal team.
MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian, who with his colleague Carol Leonnig has been doing the best reporting on all this, said on Morning Joe Friday morning that she presented the case to the grand jury herself. None of the line prosecutors in an office of more than 100 attorneys would even join her. Yes, it must be admitted: She did get these citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia to bring these two charges (she failed to convince them of a third charge whose contents aren’t yet known). But the fact that no career prosecutor would join her speaks to the flimsiness of the case.
Let’s talk about the charges. As you’ve no doubt read, they are based on testimony Comey gave to a Senate committee in September 2020. It was pandemic time, and so he testified from his home in Virginia, which is why the charges were filed there and not in Washington. Ted Cruz asked Comey if he authorized then–Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to leak certain facts to Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett (now covering this matter for the Times) back in 2016 pertaining to the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton. Comey said he did not.
Now you might be saying, “Well, that sounds like something we should get to the bottom of, actually.” That’s the thing. We already have. This has all been investigated. The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, or OIG, investigated the matter and issued a report in 2018. I’m going to get down into some weeds here in these next three paragraphs, but these details are important, bear with me.
To the extent that any upcoming trial might hinge on the question of Comey’s word versus McCabe’s, the inspector general’s report’s findings do not bode well for the neophyte prosecutor. The report found that McCabe “lacked candor” on four separate matters: in a conversation with Comey (see below) and on three separate occasions when he was being interviewed—under oath—by the inspector general’s office.
Now let’s go to the OIG report and scroll down to page 22, where the report discusses its conclusions about a crucial conversation between Comey and McCabe “on or around” October 31, 2016. The subject arose during that conversation of whether McCabe had provided information to the Journal for an article that appeared the day before, headlined “FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe.”
The question at issue, then and today, is whether McCabe had informed his boss—whether Comey knew of the leak, because he later told Ted Cruz at that hearing that he did not. McCabe told the inspector general that he said at the meeting that he had authorized the leak, but he never said he told Comey. Comey told the inspector general that McCabe “definitely” had not told him. The report then states: “While the only direct evidence regarding this McCabe-Comey conversation [was] the recollections of the two participants, there is considerable circumstantial evidence, and we concluded that the overwhelming weight of that evidence supported Comey’s version of the conversation. Indeed, none of the circumstantial evidence provided support for McCabe’s account of the discussion; rather, we found that much of the available evidence undercut McCabe’s claim.”
Maybe that’s why none of the career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia followed their new boss down the road of endorsing this indictment.
But none of that matters to Trump. All he knows is that Comey was investigating his Russia ties, and now, nearly a decade later, Comey must be destroyed. Trump’s vile hyperbole about Comey—a “bad person,” a “sick guy,” and worse—lays bare that this is nothing more than a personal witch hunt. That’s the other thing about authoritarian thugs, besides the faux patriotism: They accuse their opponents of doing exactly what they are perpetrating. It has a name: accusation in a mirror—accuse your political foes of doing exactly that which you yourself are doing or plan to do. The Nazis used to say that the Jews were planning on wiping out the German people.
Trump, far from being the victim of witch hunts, is the orchestrator of them. But even he has never sunk this low. This is a crime against the best values of this republic. It is a profoundly un-American act. And so far, the entire Republican Party, and the vast propaganda network that gets to call itself “the press” and enjoy the protections of the First Amendment, are complicit.
This is just the beginning. Trumped-up indictments of Adam Schiff and Letitia James are presumably coming. And then George Soros, for funding “terrorism.” Who’s next? Who knows. To Trump, all these people hate America. But the one who actually hates America is the man who is so ignorant and dismissive of its highest principles that he thinks he’s entitled to use the justice system to destroy people he doesn’t like. And history will remember who that is.
