Trump Indicts Comey For Torpedoing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential Campaign
In 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein produced a letter purporting to fire FBI Director James Comey for being too mean to Hillary Clinton.
“The Director laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial,” he tut-tutted over Comey’s press conference explaining his decision not to prosecute the presidential candidate. “It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”
Eight years later, Trump’s personal lawyer indicted James Comey for being mean to Hillary Clinton.
Because history may not rhyme, but it does echo … in the stupidest way possible.
Then as now, absolutely no one was fooled. In 2017, Trump raced to confirm on television that he’d fired Comey to end the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. In 2025, Trump brayed for and then celebrated the charges against his enemies without bothering himself too much about the nature of the supposed crime.
“JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” he screeched on social media, celebrating the indictment of “one of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to” for “various illegal and unlawful acts.”
The nature of those “various illegal and unlawful acts” was entirely beside the point. By this morning, the president seems to have figured out that “HE LIED!” about something, although what he did not specify.
“James ‘Dirty Cop’ Comey was a destroyer of lives,” he ranted. “He knew exactly what he was saying, and that it was a very serious and far reaching lie for which a very big price must be paid!”
As of this writing, no bill of particulars has been docketed, and the public still does not know “exactly what he was saying.” The general consensus is that the “materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement” undergirding the 18 U.S.C. § 1001 charge is Comey’s denial that he’d authorized his deputy Andy McCabe to speak to journalists about the ongoing investigation of Hillary Clinton.
McCabe spoke off the record to the Wall Street Journal about the ongoing FBI inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails for an October 13, 2016 article by Devlin Barrett. He testified that he’d gotten the greenlight from his boss, although it’s possible to read what McCabe said as implying that Comey had blessed the disclosure after the fact. Comey said he didn’t recall that, and a 2018 inspector general’s report suggested that Comey’s account was probably closer to the truth. When the DOJ tried to indict McCabe for the lie in 2019, it got no-billed.
In short, there will never be a way to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Comey was lying to Congress in 2020 when he said, “I can only speak to my testimony. I stand by the testimony.” That is almost certainly why Erik Siebert, the highly competent career prosecutor Trump installed as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, refused to seek an indictment. But with the clock ticking on the five-year statute of limitations, Trump pushed out Siebert last Friday. By Monday, Trump’s personal attorney Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer from Florida, had been sworn in as his replacement.
Lacking any prosecutorial experience or ethical scruple, Halligan raced to indict the president’s enemy, bootstrapping on an obstruction of Congress charge for good measure. The grand jury rejected a third charge involving another purported false statement, although Halligan reportedly signed both the rejected and accepted indictments and handed them to the duty judge.
The case was assigned to Judge Michael Nachmanoff, a Biden appointee who spent 13 years as a federal public defender in EDVA. The case is set for arraignment on October 9, where Halligan will face off against Patrick Fitzgerald, one of the most storied prosecutors in modern history. Hilarity will no doubt ensue.
The defendant remains defiant.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making liberals root for James Comey again. And all it took was breaking the DOJ.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
