Benjamin Wittes writes:

The conventional approach would be to go through the normal pretrial motions, and specifically to file a motion to dismiss based on an allegation of vindictive prosecution. This would be one of the most powerful such motions ever filed in an American court—the abusiveness of this indictment having little parallel in the modern history of the Department of Justice. It would be powerful just based on the public record: the president’s public statements and specific removal of the prosecutor who refused to bring this case, his public demands for Comey’s indictment and his replacement of the prosecutor who wouldn’t seek it with Halligan because she would, the profligate leaks of her plans, and the president’s triumphant and vengeful public social media statement this evening when she did.

The discovery associated with this motion—which would necessarily be extraordinary—would reveal the profoundly corrupt and abusive process by which this indictment came about.

Juries are dangerous creatures and lawyers rightly want to get charges dismissed without reaching them. So one possibility is that this case will go into the usual post-arraignment deep freeze while the lawyers duke things out for any number of months.

But Comey tonight hinted at another possibility. In a short video released this evening, he declared: “I’m innocent, so let’s have a trial.”

Pretrial motions can take a lot of time and Comey is a proud person who—as this video reflects—-has no doubt of his innocence and that the facts support his innocence. A motion to dismiss because of prosecutorial conduct, moreover, doesn’t show the evidentiary vapidity of the charge. So another possibility is that Comey will seek a quick trial aimed at showing just how empty these allegations are. [Continue reading…]