Guilty Or Not, James Comey Is In Real Trouble

It's ugly, it's improper, it's bogus, it's political, it's payback, and it's happening anyway.

“It’s about justice really. It’s not revenge. It’s also about the fact that you can’t let this go on. They are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it,” [Trump] said.

At the time Donald Trump became a convicted felon, I wrote the following:

“…both sides are right about what motivates the other. Democrats don’t really care about the law here. Trump falsifying his records might rank 400th on their list of most objectionable things Donald Trump has done, if it ranks at all. And Republicans don’t care about the law either. They’re only screaming because it’s their guy on the ropes. Trump famously said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters. He was right, and that hasn’t changed.

Depending on your priors, this is either the overdue comeuppance of a scoundrel or the meritless persecution of a martyr. There’s no bridging that gap between perceptions. There’s only the law.”

I also said this:

The United States is not a banana republic, and this verdict does not make us one. The shock and outrage on display are not outgrowths of a real belief that we are. What’s sending folks for a loop is the fact that people with Trump’s money, connections, fame, and legal resources are usually able to stay a few jumps ahead of the lawmen. They walk between the raindrops. But Trump slipped up. He got careless, and now he’s got a jacket.

Not sure if I totally stand by all this now.

My earlier piece also issues a series of rebuttals to what were common, pro-Trump talking points circulating at the time of his prosecution. The piece is paywalled, so if you want to rage-out at me over it, you’ll have to shell out for the privilege. If you do, you can also check to see whether you think what I wrote then makes me a hypocrite for what I’m writing now.

Former FBI Director James Comey is charged with having lied to Congress in his response to a question about strategic leaks during the Russiagate investigation. He said, under oath, that he never directed such leaks. DOJ says he did.

There’s no smoking gun here, from what we can tell. Prosecutors have communications from people in Comey’s orbit that, they say, make clear that, whatever his official line, he wanted the leaks to happen. That he ordered them without ordering them; he made his intentions clear while maintaining plausible deniability.

“Man, wouldn’t it be great if somebody fired off an anonymous email to the New York Times..?”

That’s the gist.

Counting in Comey’s favor, the charges came as the result of a extremely shady process. The US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, just quit over fears he’d be fired for not bringing charges against another Trump foe, Leticia James.

Siebert’s replacement, Lindsay Halligan, is a Trump lackey and has already drawn raised eyebrows from the judge for having personally signed and filed two, separate indictments for the same case - a bizarre move.

Lindsey Halligan

There were other irregularities, though some of them can probably be chalked up to Halligan’s being unfamiliar with the courts she now has to work with, owing to her lacking anything like the requisite experience for her new role.

“It is not clear who assisted Ms. Halligan in drafting the bare-bones, two-page indictment. Tellingly, she was the only one to sign the paperwork. Typically such filings are also endorsed by career prosecutors who have gathered the evidence in the case.

Only 14 of the 23 grand jurors who heard the presentation of charges voted to indict Mr. Comey, narrowly clearing the 12-vote threshold, according to the magistrate judge who oversaw the proceedings.

Moments later, it became clear that Ms. Halligan, the only government lawyer assigned to the case as of Saturday, would need some serious backup.”

Ouch.

The bottom line here is that this is has all the hallmarks of a politically directed prosecution, and it signals the end of any semblance of an independent Justice Department.

Actually no, that’s not the bottom line. The bottom line is that none of that matters anymore anyway.

I will now briefly lay out the case for and against James Comey.

Guilty:

The leaks helped Comey. He’s not an idiot, and knew he couldn’t order them directly. But the people working under him also weren’t idiots. They could read between his lines. He figured his game of footsie would never be held to scrutiny, but now it has been. The prosecution might struggle with some technicalities, but the substance of the charge is on point: he wanted the office to leak, and so he made it happen. He can’t really argue that he didn’t do it, only that the prosecution can’t prove he did it.

Not Guilty:

James Comey is a Boy Scout. His commitment to truth telling is so absolute, he functionally threw the 2016 election to Donald Trump over a perceived ethical obligation to full disclosure. This is not a guy who gets cute with procedure. Whether or not press leaks helped him, he would never have sanctioned them, subtly or otherwise. A more credible explanation is that a less scrupulous person working under him took misguided initiative on their own. The DOJ can’t prove he lied to Congress because he actually didn’t: he never ordered any leaks.

Neither of these scenarios strike me as wholly implausible. And even the one in which Comey is guilty wouldn’t cause me to regard him as a particularly bad or villainous person. Sneaky press leaks might have helped him with a case he knew had legs, but they also carried the risk of backfire. Maybe he ordered them, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he fibbed to Congress, maybe he didn’t.

What makes this such an obvious tit-for-tat are the similarities between Comey’s case (presuming he’s factually guilty) and Trump’s felony case (in which he absolutely was).

In both situations, the charges would have been unlikely to be filed against a person who wasn’t a famous political player.

Trump totally did what he was convicted of. There aren’t really any good arguments to suggest he didn’t. The issue was that circular justifications were deployed to elevate his malfeasance from a misdemeanor to a felony, and that nobody would ever have bothered doing that if he hadn’t been Donald Trump. Which is probably true.

Does that mean Trump was the victim of a “political prosecution?” I argued at the time that it didn’t, but that may have been a naive framing on my part. Or at least, a shortsighted one.

Trump’s problem, then and now, is not that he’s a Republican and that DOJ Democrats just hate those. It’s that he’s an impulsive megalomaniac who thinks rules don’t apply to him, and who staff cannot rein in. Nobody - absolutely nobody - made him go fuck a porn star and then try to pay her off. And nobody made him record those payments as legal fees when they weren’t.

Additionally, it is untrue - despite what was said often - that the Manhattan DA “never brings charges” like the ones they did against Trump, or that he was prosecuted under a “novel” legal theory. Here’s another link to the rundown I did at the time, which you can check out if you’re interested.

Anyway, Trump is now throwing a similar sinker at James Comey. True or false, the charges against Comey are odd. Even if he did it, this isn’t a thing for which the James Comeys of the world typically get handcuffed. And it’s not in doubt that he ended up in the firing line simply by being James Comey and for crossing Trump.

Look, I’m ultimately a cynical bastard. For all I care, these two fuckers can be cellmates. I neither know, nor give a shit, whether either of them should spend their golden years on a golf course or in a 6x8 box.

But this is all a very good lesson in “if you aim at the king, don’t miss.”

Merrick Garland appropriately gained a reputation as a feckless pussy during his tenure as Biden’s AG. This was a guy who, yeah, wanted to project plenty of distaste for Trump. But he never wanted to go out on a limb and actually end him. He thought he could have it both ways: make clear that Trump was a criminal, while exercising noble restraint in dealing with him.

That seems not to have super worked out…

So we now have a vengeful, paranoid president, who (perhaps understandably) regards the bulk of his intelligence and law enforcement apparatus as oriented against him. These are not good conditions.

I get that nobody thought he would win again. But he did. And now we have to deal with it.

My feeling during the Trump trial was that the rule of law needed to be paramount in these situations. Trump transgressed, so Trump pays. Who cares if the prosecution was motivated, and who cares if he used to be president?

I also ignored righter-leaning people who said that it didn’t matter if he was technically guilty, convicting him was the beginning of the end.

They were right. I wasn’t. There actually are good reasons to abstain from trying to prosecute the opposition’s political leaders, even if they’ve done what you’re trying to prosecute them for. It leads to…well, it leads to this.

And that sucks to admit. It means that guys like Donald Trump, and I guess even James Comey, are above the law. Worse, it may mean they need to stay that way.

My pal

Prester John Andrews

recently warned that the United States could be entering a period similar to Italy’s “years of lead,” a multi-decade stretch in the second half of the 20th century that was characterized by wanton, politicized violence and terrorism.

Also in the second half of that century, Italy averaged more than one government per year. Not only is that an astonishing level of instability for a nation - one in which corruption and political prosecution had become simply background noise - it’s not at all unreasonable to tie those two things together; instability with violence.

I was naive about what Trump’s prosecution meant. I thought whatever, this guys does appear to do a lot of crime. It’s only fair that he account for it. Oh, my sweet, summer self…

It almost doesn’t matter now whether this works out or not. Whether Comey goes down or he doesn’t. This is already so different. It’s one thing for the DOJ to look into a former president. It’s quite another for a current president to direct his DOJ to look into current enemies.

Pandora’s Box is open. Trump’s list is long. The shit may stick to Comey or it may slide off, but one thing appears certain: we’re only just getting started.