Using the U.S. Department of Justice to persecute an enemy represents a serious abuse of power, yet President Donald Trump and his DOJ underlings from Attorney General Pam Bondi on down seem perfectly happy to go after former FBI Director James Comey with the most threadbare of cases. Comey is alleged to have lied to Congress and obstructed a congressional investigation. That certainly sounds bad, but upon closer examination, there is not much there there.
Comey is charged with lying during a 2020 hearing about whether he had authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source for news reports years earlier. That the indictment was sought just days before the statute of limitations was about to kick in offers one clue about the validity of the charge. That a career prosecutor resigned rather than bring the case to the grand jury while others in the Eastern District of Virginia were fired offers another. That it was eventually brought by a former personal lawyer to Trump without experience in such matters offers more.
And in case anyone thinks there might be a legitimate legal concern here, we need only turn to Trump’s own social media account, where he posted on Sept. 20 his orders for Bondi to produce Comey’s indictment in trademark all-capital letters style: “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
So much for the Justice Department prosecutors staying independent of politics and making decisions based on facts and the law, not on personal vendetta. How long will it take to get a federal judge to kick out this abuse of power? Small wonder that Comey welcomed a trial after his indictment. He still has faith in the legal system. The charges, after all, started out on a pretty slender thread (turning on who said what and when about the 2016 presidential election result and the legal meaning of the word “authorize”).
For most Americans, the news here isn’t whether an FBI director told his deputy to say this or that; it’s about a pattern of presidential interference in the DOJ. This isn’t supposed to happen in post-Watergate America. Yet from using his Federal Communications Commission chairman to threaten and intimidate ABC over a late-night comedian to proposing using Democratically controlled U.S. cities as a “training ground” for the military with aggressive displays of force over alleged immigration violations, Trump is demonstrating a keen disinterest in following constitutional norms.
Peter Jensen is an editorial writer at The Baltimore Sun; he can be reached at pejensen@baltsun.com.
