Quinta Jurecic writes:

For years, Donald Trump has demanded that criminal charges be filed against former FBI Director James Comey. Now the president has gotten what he wanted. Yesterday evening, well after the federal courts usually close their doors, a grand jury in Virginia handed up an indictment alleging that Comey lied when testifying before Congress in September 2020. The news was first announced (how else?) in a post on X by the Trump ally Laura Loomer.

The charges represent a dangerous step in Trump’s attempt to further consolidate power, while also being a total farce and a potentially historic embarrassment. They are not even about the FBI’s investigation of Russian election interference in 2016, Trump’s main grievance against Comey and the original sin, in the president’s mind, of the “deep state.” But those events were outside the statute of limitations, so instead the charges focus on an unrelated dispute concerning whether Comey authorized FBI officials to speak anonymously to the press before Trump fired him in May 2017. The whole case will depend on prosecutors’ ability to show that Comey was intentionally lying when answering confusing questions from Republican senators about a dustup that had taken place more than three years earlier. And it’s not even clear that Comey’s response before Congress was factually wrong.

The Justice Department should never have brought such an astoundingly shoddy case. The decision to do so, under intense pressure from the president to harass his old enemy, is an indication of how thoroughly Trump has been able to corrupt the department.Trump seemingly wanted the Justice Department to find something, anything, to pin on the former FBI director, and he doesn’t appear to care much about the actual charges—or even whether the case holds up in court. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he posted last weekend, later telling reporters that prosecutors “have to act fast.” The 2020 congressional testimony will edge past the five-year statute-of-limitations mark next Tuesday. In any other political moment, this would be obviously impeachable conduct.

This is not, it should be said, how the department has typically liked to do things. After Watergate, the DOJ built up an edifice meant to protect the rule of law and prosecutorial independence from a president’s interference. But all of that seems to have come crashing down. [Continue reading…]