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On Thursday evening, the Department of Justice issued an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey — charging him with having given false statements to Congress while under oath.
As a journalist focused on covering weakening democracies, this triggered some pretty evident warning signals for me. President Donald Trump had already publicly urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring Comey, one of his most outspoken detractors, to trial, but she seemed to be hindered by what appeared to be a complete absence of evidence. This very morning, ABC News indicated that lawyers in Virginia’s Eastern District had scrutinized Comey for a couple of months but didn’t uncover sufficient justification to support a criminal charge. The fact that such a charge was actually filed gives off the strong impression of a retaliatory endeavor by an autocratic president to turn the legal system against those who oppose him.
But perhaps I was being unjust to Lindsey Halligan, the federal prosecutor for Virginia’s Eastern District, I pondered. Maybe ABC was mistaken, and there truly was incriminating evidence that Comey committed a transgression.
Thus, I perused the indictment. And astonishingly, it is even more troubling than I anticipated.
The Comey indictment is an embarrassment to authoritarians
The indictment is quite concise — merely two pages in length. I’ve made it available for viewing down below, and I’d advise that you give it a read in its entirety prior to moving forward.
The initial allegation is that Comey intentionally made a false statement to the Senate in September 2020, when he asserted that he had not “authorized another individual at the FBI to function as an unidentified source in news stories” concerning an investigation into an individual who remains unnamed, referred to as Person 1 (who, in light of the context of the session, is most probably Trump). The indictment alleges that he actually did authorize someone to act as an anonymous informant to the press concerning this individual, therefore being dishonest with Congress.
And that’s the long and short of it. There is no contextualization of what Comey was discussing at the time of the session, the justifications federal prosecutors held for presuming he was being untruthful — nothing whatsoever. Just a simple assertion that Comey lied.
The indictment’s second allegation is even more ill-defined. It asserts that Comey “did corruptly endeavor to influence, obstruct and impede the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which an investigation was being had before the Senate Judiciary Committee by making false and misleading statements.”
That perplexing expression uses the word ‘statements’ in its plural form, and is not confined to the solitary quote found within count one. But the specifics of these statements are omitted. It becomes impossible to decipher the supposed wrongdoing of Comey according to federal prosecutors, and equally impossible to determine the reasons for their assertions.
You could possibly see this as commonplace in connection with a well-known federal indictment. I can vouch for it not being the case. A run-of-the-mill indictment is comprised of precise and explicit details intended to demonstrate that there is a legitimate basis for the assumption that the accused party perpetrated the offenses under consideration.
For instance, in examining the indictment of Jeffrey Epstein, you will uncover strikingly thorough explanations of the means used by Epstein to obtain minors for sexual acts. In studying the indictment of former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), you will come across photographs of the solid gold bars he accepted as illicit payments. Moreover, should you give one of the federal indictments of Trump a read, you’re certain to find narrations of the conversations through which Trump played a part in arranging a scheme to unlawfully subvert the 2020 election.
But if you scrutinize Comey’s indictment, you’ll come across nothing comparable. There is simply no rational basis for the belief that he committed offenses, other than what has been claimed by the government.
It is still within the realm of possibility that federal prosecutors may possess additional information. Comey admitted, in 2017 testimony, to having provided a friend with copies of memos concerning his discourse with Trump, with the intention that the friend (a law professor with the name of Daniel Richman) would ultimately make their content public. Additionally, federal prosecutors recently issued a subpoena for Richman as part of the investigation into possible perjury. But would Comey have truly been untruthful about something he had already acknowledged himself?
Adding to the complication, we are still uncertain that the indictment concerns Richman. My colleague Andrew Prokop surmises that the indictment is likely to be about a distinct disagreement between Comey and his prior deputy Andrew McCabe regarding leaked information to the Wall Street Journal. This would pose an issue for the prosecution, given that a probe conducted by the Office of the Inspector General concluded that “the overwhelming weight of that evidence supported Comey’s version of the conversation.” If that’s the case, why introduce the matter presently?
The circumstances of this matter may potentially be a bit clearer if federal prosecutors had incorporated specific details into their indictment; however, they opted not to. Quite plainly, there is no method available to assess their allegations, given that such allegations are without any factual foundation.
The question now
Which directs me back to the initial point I put forward — apprehensions pertaining to a politically motivated prosecution.
Trump has openly advocated for politically driven prosecutions and has applied pressure on the Justice Department to take action against Comey in particular. The indictment presented a prime opportunity to cultivate an impression of legitimacy, which is the tactic used by sagacious authoritarians when detaining their adversaries — yet they executed it completely ineptly. The standard of the legal composition is so woefully deficient that it seemingly seeks to actively corroborate assertions that this constitutes a fabricated political case.
Ken Dilanian of MSNBC, a journalist with robust connections to the Justice Department beat, stated that the sentiment within the department is somber.
“What I am hearing from DOJ sources: The Comey indictment is among the worst abuses in DOJ history,” Dilanian stated. “It’s hard to overstate how…big a moment this is.”
This implies that the logical interpretation of the indictment — that it exemplifies authoritarian overreach carried out by an authoritarian president — aligns with reality.
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Source: vox.com
