James Comey indicted

You throw someone an election, and this is the thanks you get:

James Comey was charged Thursday with making a false statement and obstruction in a criminal case filed days after President Donald Trump appeared to urge his attorney general to prosecute the former FBI director and other perceived political enemies.

The indictment makes Comey the first former senior government official to face prosecution in connection with one of Trump’s chief grievances: the long-concluded investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump and his supporters have long derided that investigation as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” despite multiple government reviews showing Moscow interfered on behalf of the Republican’s campaign.

The criminal case is likely to deepen concerns that the Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Trump loyalist, is being weaponized in pursuit of investigations and now prosecutions of public figures the president regards as his political enemies.

It was filed as the White House has taken steps to exert influence in unprecedented ways on the operations of the Justice Department, blurring the line between law and politics for an agency where independence in prosecutorial decision-making is a foundational principle.

As Paul said yesterday, it’s hard not to feel a touch of schadenfreude about the guy who gave us Trump out of fear that Jason Chaffetz would yell at him (“chickenshit club” indeed!). It remains one of the most twisted ironies of the Trump era that the pretextural reason he cynically gave for firing Comey was also absolutely correct on the merits. One might even conclude that Hillar Clinton’s compliance with email server security protocols was not the most important subject involving the abuse of power at stake in the 2016 election. But nothing good comes from this — it’s a grotesque abuse of power that would be immediately impeachable in any remotely functioning constitutional order. But, hey, at least we’re getting the BOLD EXECUTIVE ACTION that John Roberts envisioned when he said that [Republican] presidents should be above the law.

…It’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is an FBI director who will just fucking follow department policy rather than engaging in free-form editorializing about one and only one of the candidates in the middle of a federal election:

Damn, man, you're saying they took old material that had already been rejected as a criminal case and repackaged it to create the appearance of wrongdoing? That's fucked up, who would do that.— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca.bsky.social) Sep 25, 2025 at 4:22 PM