DOJ Has No Clue What It’s Doing With Comey Case, Legal Expert Warns

Members of the Justice Department team prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey are so green that they don’t actually know what they’re supposed to do with the case.

The former FBI chief was charged last month with lying to Congress regarding his testimony to Senator Ted Cruz in a 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Comey has maintained his innocence and denied any wrongdoing. He could face a maximum of five years in prison if convicted.

Going against the grain of official statements by FBI leadership, Donald Trump has all but admitted that he was behind Comey’s indictment. But in order to make the case happen, certain people needed to be pushed out of the way and replaced. That included the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, whose replacement was handpicked by the president himself: White House aide Lindsey Halligan.

Ignoring protocol, Halligan has moved full steam ahead on prosecutions under the banner of Trump’s approval, despite the fact that she still needs to be confirmed by the Senate. (In fact, Trump has just two Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys in place.)

Halligan’s team is even less familiar with the former FBI director’s case. Halligan was reportedly “silent” during court proceedings Wednesday, while the two attorneys she recruited from the Eastern District of North Carolina agreed to a timeline on Comey’s terms. Their rationale, as recalled by MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin, was telling.

“Why? ‘Because we’re trying to give the defendant all the time he needs to prepare for trial,’” Rubin told the network Wednesday night, speaking from the perspective of Halligan’s team. “But also there’s a substantial amount of discovery in this case, your honor, including classified materials.”

“That’s a very, very nice, thinly disguised way of saying, ‘We’re brand new to this and we got to get our arms around it, too, because guess what? We’re not the ones who investigated this case. We’re not the ones who charged this case,’” Rubin continued. “‘And we got to learn what it is that we’re supposed to do here by some point in January.’”

Comey, who worked as a longtime federal prosecutor and even served as the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the office prosecuting him now, has already challenged Halligan’s appointment.

“If Halligan was named as an interim U.S. attorney, Comey has an argument that she is not legally serving because the law does not permit successive appointments of interim U.S. attorneys by the attorney general,” Nina Mendelson, professor of law at University of Michigan, told CNN.

President Donald Trump got caught trying to make the peace deal between Israel and Hamas all about him.

During a roundtable discussion Wednesday with right-wing influencers to discuss antifascist resistance to Trump’s reign, Secretary of State Marco Rubio attempted to pass a note to the president. 

The Daily Beast reported that Trump appeared to read the note before motioning Rubio over. The secretary whispered in the president’s ear and then returned to his seat. Trump answered a few more questions, before informing the pitiable right-wing shills he’d assembled to discuss antifa that he had to go “solve some problems in the Middle East.” Rubio took remaining questions on his behalf.

Evan Vucci, AP’s chief photographer in Washington, snapped a photograph of the note and posted it on X. “Very close. We need you to approve a Truth Social post so you can announce deal first,” the note said. 

Two hours later, after a lengthy call with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and nepo-hire Jared Kushner to review his social media post, Trump announced a deal between Israel and Hamas.

“I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan. This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace. All Parties will be treated fairly!” he wrote on Truth Social. 

Per the terms of the deal, all remaining hostages will be released from Gaza, and scores of Palestinians may be released from Israeli prisons. Israel is reportedly in talks to release as many as 2,000 prisoners. 

It seems clear that Trump wants to be the savior of the Middle East. His 20-point peace plan places himself in charge of the so-called “Board of Peace” that will oversee Gaza’s “redevelopment” and governance. Trump’s group would theoretically run things until the Palestinian Authority implements its own reform plan that satisfies Trump’s standards and “is conducive to attracting investment.” 

It’s more clear than ever that in Trump’s White House, a peace deal is indistinguishable from a P.R. stunt, or a power grab. Trump’s announcement came just two days before this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient will be revealed—an honor for which Trump has fiercely lobbied, though still could never deserve.  

A Chicago pastor is suing the Trump administration after ICE agents shot him in the head with pepper balls. 

Last month, Reverend David Black, the senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was shot right in the face with a pepper ball by an ICE agent standing on a rooftop above him while he was protesting at the Broadview ICE facility. Black can be seen with his arms spread wide, praying at the masked, armed agents above him, before being shot in the head at least twice and falling to his knees. Black said he could hear ICE laughing at him when it happened.  

The video has now gone viral. 

“I invited them to repentance,” Black told Religion News Service. “I basically offered an altar call. I invited them to come and receive that salvation, and be part of the kingdom that is coming.”

The lawsuit hinges on ICE infringing upon protesters’ First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and religion, as agents have displayed “a pattern of extreme brutality” aimed to “silence the press and civilians.”

Black is not the only clergy member involved in the lawsuit. Unitarian minister Beth Johnson was “fired upon without warning or justification as she and other protesters and clergy members stood on the sidewalk singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and other traditional songs of protest,” according to the lawsuit. United Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was also shot at with pepper balls. 

It’s obvious in the video that Black—standing out among the crowd in his preacher’s garb—was absolutely a target, and it’s likely that the other faith leaders can say the same. 

The Trump administration accuses Black of trying to “dictate crowd-control policy in ways that would tie the hands of federal law enforcement officers,” while online MAGA has dismissed him as “antifa” for his vocal support of equal rights in Chicago. 

Donald Trump’s reckless social media use could imperil his administration’s already flimsy case against James Comey, the former FBI director and enemy of Trump who was indicted last month on evidently politically motivated charges.

On Wednesday evening, The Wall Street Journal revealed a striking detail about the president’s September 20 Truth Social post ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to make haste in prosecuting Comey and other MAGA enemies, i.e., Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

As many suspected, that message was actually meant to be sent privately to the attorney general.

“Trump believed he had sent Bondi the message directly,” the Journal reports, “and was surprised to learn it was public.” Chagrined, the attorney general called the White House, and Trump provided a balm in a subsequent post praising Bondi.

“The misfire provided a window into how, through command and chaos, Trump has executed a wholesale transformation of the Justice Department,” the Journal reports. It also raises a host of legal troubles for the department’s case against Comey.

As former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki following the revelation, this could pose “a big problem, legally and substantively” for Trump and the DOJ, giving Comey and the others mentioned in the message “viable motions to dismiss indictments.”

Comey’s attorney is reportedly looking to dismiss the case for “vindictive prosecution.” His trial is set for January, but before that, he can file a request to dismiss charges, on the ground that they were brought due to animus rather than legitimate legal reasons. As CNN’s Aaron Blake noted, if the Journal’s reporting is accurate, “it’s not inconceivable that an errant DM from Trump could be a big reason why Comey’s case is dismissed for vindictive prosecution.”

Though motions for vindictive prosecution are rarely successful, Bharara noted that Comey already has a better-than-average case for one, given Trump’s long record of public animosity toward him. What’s more, Bharara notes that the Journal’s reporting strongly suggests that additional communications between Trump and DOJ officials have taken place, which could help further determine the vindictiveness of the prosecution.

If the defense team acquires such messages in discovery, “that’s very, very bad for the prosecution,” he observed. Even worse would be if messages were deleted, which could potentially lead to an “adverse inference,” or the assumption that destroyed evidence would have been unfavorable to whoever destroyed it.

Further, Bharara said, “There is an argument that those communications and the destruction thereof by themselves are a basis to dismiss an indictment.”

A self-described journalist briefed the president and top U.S. officials Wednesday on the threat of the “homeless industrial complex.”

During a White House roundtable on antifa, Jonathan Choe, a reporter for Turning Point USA’s newsroom Frontlines, claimed that political extremism on the ideological left intersects with the “homeless drug crisis.” As evidence, he shared a recent report from the Discovery Institute, a conservative propaganda mill that, among other things, has advocated for ending classroom instruction on evolution.

The complex, according to those on the right who believe it’s real, is effectively a vast network of nonprofits and their beneficiaries who guzzle up federal funds intended for the homeless.

“In many cases, the homeless industrial complex is running cover for antifa, and antifa is benefiting from American tax dollars, and they’re essentially being used as the muscle,” Choe said.

He then pointed to Stop the Sweeps, a franchise-like, community-coordinated campaign that aims to prevent state violence against homeless encampments. People actually wanting to help the homeless is, apparently, not believable for Choe. Instead, he told the president and his allies that this organization’s ultimate intention was to create a P.R. crisis for law enforcement.

“What they’re doing quietly, is they’re bringing in antifa militants to manufacture a crisis to make the police look bad,” Choe said. (Of course, police don’t have to brutalize and violently evict the homeless.)

Some recent actions by supposed “antifa militants” include tossing a bucket of paint, protesting ICE facilities, and flag burning.

But Choe didn’t stop at antifa—instead, he lumped the famously decentralized antifascist organization in with the Democratic Socialists of America, placing a target on the back of a bona fide political party.

“These far-left, progressive groups tend to be aligning themselves with antifa,” Choe said. “There is a deeply embedded connection between the homeless housing nonprofit game in America, connected to antifa, and the far-left activists.”

For years, Donald Trump and his allies have pushed the idea that violent, far-left radicals are wreaking havoc in cities across the country, but their rhetoric has been noticeably devoid of evidence. To quell the noise, members of the House Intelligence Committee asked the CIA and FBI in 2020 to investigate false intelligence campaigns and find proof of the anti-fascist group’s “invasion.” Despite reports contradicting Trump’s rhetoric, the noise did not die down.

The reality is that homelessness is on the rise in the United States. An unprecedented national housing shortage, coupled with shallow social safety nets, has turned into an equally unprecedented rise in those experiencing homelessness. Rates spiked by 18 percent in 2024 compared to the year before, per data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But those figures are apparently just a launch pad for building more confounding conspiracies, as showcased by the work of the president’s cadre of far-right influencers.

Did MAGA activist Jack Posobiec just accidentally compare President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler?

During a Wednesday roundtable discussion on antifa populated by pitiable right-wing shills, the conspiracy theorist took a moment to claim that the so-called domestic terrorist group had historical roots in Germany.

“Antifa is real. Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost a hundred years, in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany,” Posobiec whined.

Indeed, there were multiple groups that opposed fascism in the Weimar Republic and voiced strong opposition to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, including the Communist Party of Germany’s Antifaschistische Aktion group and the Iron Front, which partnered with the Democratic Socialists. Posobiec seems to think that comparing modern-day antifascists opposing Trump’s reign to these groups opposing Hitler should demonstrate how terrible antifa is—when in fact, it did just the opposite.

Posobiec, perhaps better known as the Pizzagate guy, fancies himself a historian but appears blind to the most obvious comparison to the present day.

The antifascist groups in Weimar Germany were staunchly ideologically opposed, with little connecting them other than their opposition to authoritarianism. Ironically, that’s the case for many of the so-called members of antifa, which is short for “anti-fascist” and is a movement, not a group. The so-called organization lacks a central structure and is instead a loose network of individuals and groups who act separately under the banner of opposing facism.

Posobiec previously co-wrote a book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). The book supposedly tracks the opponents of conservatism throughout history, and endorses a modern-day McCarthyism to root out the “radicals” from American institutions. It’s worth noting that Vice President JD Vance provided a glowing promotional blurb about the book.

“On a base level, unhumans seek the death of the successful and the desecration of the beautiful,” Posobiec and his ghostwriter claimed, later adding, “Take the path of the hunter, and with one singular voice, we are going to make them the prey.”

In the end, Posobiec is a facism fanboy who likes to vote in a swing state he doesn’t even live in, and Trump’s roundtable on countering antifascism is exactly the political farce it presents as.

“We took the freedom of speech away,” President Donald Trump boasted in his opening remarks at his “antifa roundtable” Wednesday.

The remark came as Trump touted an August 25 executive order seeking to crack down on the practice of flag burning, a form of protest that the Supreme Court has previously ruled is protected by the First Amendment.

“We’ve made it a one-year penalty for inciting riots. We took the freedom of speech away, because that’s been through the courts,” Trump said before making other addled statements about his unconstitutional stance on flag burning.

It was a jarring admission—perhaps a Freudian slip—from a president who is, indeed, evidently intent on eliminating free speech.

Supreme Court precedent firmly establishes flag burning as a form of First Amendment–protected symbolic speech. And for what it’s worth, Trump’s executive order did not specify a one-year jail sentence. It did, however, direct the attorney general to prosecute flag burners under existing laws—this being a tacit acknowledgment that his desired ban would unambiguously run afoul of the First Amendment.

After claiming credit for rolling back freedom of speech, the president went on to seemingly admit that he cannot completely ban flag burning, but expressed his hope to clamp down on the practice—which he says stirs up violence, as if by magic—nonetheless.

“What has happened is, when they burn a flag, it agitates and irritates crowds—they’ve never seen anything like it—on both sides, and you end up in riots,” he said. “So we’re going on that basis. We’re looking at it not from the freedom of speech, which I always felt strongly about, but never passed the courts.”

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem believes antifa is “just as dangerous” as ISIS.

In a White House roundtable discussion on “antifa” Wednesday, Noem spoke alongside President Donald Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and a number of right-wing journalists and influencers about the president’s order designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

“Their agenda is to destroy the American people and our way of life,” Noem said. “This network of antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as [Tren de Aragua], as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them. They are just as dangerous. They have an agenda to destroy us just like the other terrorists we’ve dealt with for many, many years, and today is the day that we have a president that won’t tolerate it.”

Just to catch everyone up, “antifa” is not an organized group, certainly not one with a “network as sophisticated as … ISIS.” During Trump’s first term, FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress that antifa was “not a group or an organization,” but a “movement” or “ideology.”

That hasn’t stopped the president’s sycophantic circle from blaming the movement for everything from the “decimation” of cities like Portland to the killing of Charlie Kirk.

A prominent MAGA influencer with millions of followers who has “never stepped foot in the United States” illegally donated to a QAnon congressional candidate, independent journalist Jacqueline Sweet reported for Rolling Stone Wednesday.

Rumen Naumovski is behind Resist the Mainstream, a right-wing content farm that has accrued more than 450,000 followers on X since September 2021. He also runs the X account Defiant L’s, a right-wing meme and news account with more than four million followers that has been lauded by X owner Elon Musk as “one of the best accounts.”

In 2022, Naumovski illegally donated more than $3,000 to support far-right congressional candidate Ron Watkins, who has been accused of being “Q” himself. While Naumovski owns an American-based media company, he still resides in North Macedonia, and admitted in a February opinion piece for The Daily Wire that he’d actually “never set foot in the United States.”

Naumovski’s two donations totaling $3,127 were the largest reported contribution to Watkins’s campaign in the first quarter of 2022, according to Open Secrets. And in the weeks following the donations, Watkins urged his followers on social media to join Resist the Mainstream’s Telegram channel multiple times.

Both donations were made in February 2022 and are attributed to an address in St. Petersburg, Florida, at a registered agent’s office for Raww Digital LLC, the marketing firm that owns Resist the Mainstream. Naumovski owns Raww Digital LLC, but his personal address is listed in Veles, North Macedonia.

Watkins eventually returned the money in April 2022. Naumovski told Rolling Stone that he had no idea he’d needed a green card to make donations to a political campaign. Foreign nationals are in fact barred from making contributions for a political campaign.

Media Matters reported in 2023 that a dozen influencers connected to the QAnon movement boosted Resist the Mainstream and that, despite being taken on and off mainstream social media platforms, the right-wing network had accrued a massive following in alternative spaces—platforms such as Truth Social, Rumble, Gab, and Gettr.

Naumovski’s social media accounts have become fixtures in the online landscape of MAGA Republicans, and their posts have been shared by figures including Andy Biggs, Dan Crenshaw, Eli Crane, Mike Lee, and Nancy Mace, as well as other prominent MAGA influencers. The accounts have shared content pushing election fraud conspiracies about noncitizen voting, a nonissue that has been repeatedly debunked.

In Naumovski’s case, it’s more than clear that there are some noncitizens attempting to interfere in U.S. politics—but they come in the form of anonymous influencers churning out right-wing content and conducting hordes of followers.

Even the Trump administration doesn’t like Pam Bondi.

The attorney general has been at the epicenter of some of Trump 2.0’s biggest scandals. In the last several months, Bondi has purged antitrust officials at the Justice Department, refused to answer critical questions in defiance of Senate oversight hearing protocol, and—most egregious to the White House—sparked MAGA outrage when her own agency issued a memo contradicting her on the existence of Jeffrey Epstein’s so-called “client list.”

All considered, Bondi now ranks as the White House’s least favorite Cabinet secretary, according to an informal survey of several presidential advisers by Wired’s Inner Loop newsletter.

“Worst, Bondi,” they begin. “2/ Bondi. 3/ Bondi. 4/ Bondi. 5/ HegsethRFKTulsiNoem.”

Just one secretary shared the unwelcome spotlight: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who, like Bondi, has also fumbled the administration’s talking points about the president and his pedophilic sex trafficker ex–“best pal.” Breaking from the DOJ’s narrative, Lutnick described Epstein to the New York Post podcast as “the greatest blackmailer ever.” He also didn’t bother trying to make Trump’s cozy association with Epstein more palatable. Lutnick referred to Epstein as a repugnant creep while recalling an instance in which he was invited by Epstein to tour his infamous East 71st Street townhouse.

“I say to him, ‘Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?’” Lutnick told the Post. “And he says, ‘Every day.’ And then he gets, like weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage.’

“In the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” he added.

None of the Trump advisers surveyed by Wired were willing to speak about the Trump-Epstein connection, or connect the dots between Bondi and Lutnick’s sagging popularity with their handling of the scandal.

The Epstein story has remained an anomaly in Trump’s political career. For the better part of a decade, the MAGA leader became adjusted to an undyingly loyal base that rarely skews from or challenges his political vision. But Trump’s proximity to Epstein and the disgraced financier’s heinous crimes has been an outlier, prompting doubts that have undercut Trump’s influence with large swaths of his followers.

The White House’s official spokesperson brushed off the Wired story, suggesting instead that Trump’s Cabinet are beyond reproach within MAGA’s inner folds.

“The entire premise of this story is ridiculous—which is to be expected for Wired,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The President’s entire cabinet is working to flawlessly execute his agenda to Make America Great Again and he is pleased with each of their successes and hard work.”