The Department Of Retribution (Formerly The DOJ) Gets A Comey Indictment

Donald Trump took a giant step toward the furtherance of his authoritarian power yesterday with the indictment of James Comey. Here is how Alan Feuer, Jonah E. Bromwich, and Maggie Haberman describe it in The New York Times:

The clearest way to understand the extraordinary nature of the indictment on Thursday of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, is to offer up a simple recitation of the facts.

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.

The charges, which were filed around 7 p.m. in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., thrust the Justice Department into perilous new territory. The push for the indictment trampled over the agency’s long tradition of maintaining distance from the White House and resisting political pressure, and it raised the prospect of further arbitrary prosecutions pushed by Mr. Trump against his enemies.

Heightening the break-glass moment, the felony charges against Mr. Comey, who stands accused of making false statements and obstructing justice, were rushed into court as Mr. Trump’s handpicked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, hurried to beat the quickly approaching statute of limitations on Mr. Comey’s purported crimes.

The rush to prosecute Mr. Comey was the clearest example yet of how the normal process of justice has been reversed under Mr. Trump, showing how the president came into his second term with targets already in mind and ultimately pressured the Justice Department, over a degree of internal resistance, into finding a way to charge a former director of the F.B.I.

Ms. Halligan, who had been working as a top official in the White House staff secretary’s office and had previously served as a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump, had until now never prosecuted a single case in her career.

Mr. Trump nevertheless appointed her as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia on Monday afternoon, after publicly berating Attorney General Pam Bondi on Saturday night for not moving more aggressively to prosecute Mr. Comey and two other figures who are longtime targets of his retribution campaign, Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California. . . .

In voting to indict, the grand jury judged that the evidence it heard indicated that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Comey might have committed a crime. But prosecutors have expansive sway over grand juries, and it remains unclear, given the secretive nature of such bodies, how much the grand jurors were aware of the broader circumstances of the case. . . .

That Mr. Trump could successfully initiate such a case also increases the potential costs of opposing him, an expansion of presidential power that could chill public dissent across the country.