Former FBI director James Comey was indicted last week by a federal grand jury in Virginia on charges of lying when he testified before Congress five years ago. Comey stands accused of confirming his false testimony before Congress three years earlier. He denied that he was involved in leaking information to the Wall Street Journal about the FBI’s investigation into bogus allegations that then-presidential candidate Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election, as well as the FBI’s investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized use of her private email server for classified government documents. Comey was also indicted on a second count for deliberately obstructing a congressional investigation. Each charge carries a potential jail sentence of up to five years in prison.
The anonymous leak that Comey denied being associated with was the basis for a story published by the Wall Street Journal in October 2016, the month before the presidential election. It reported on internal feuds within the FBI over the reopening of the Clinton email investigation and a previously undisclosed investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
The indictment of Comey was issued just days before the five-year federal statute of limitations on those criminal charges was set to expire. It followed public complaints by President Trump that Justice Department’s prosecutors under Attorney General Pam Bondi had failed to prosecute Comey and other senior members of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and intelligence agencies who conspired to discredit Trump’s 2016 candidacy for president, and to hobble Trump’s presidency after he won the election.
Comey was first asked at a May 2017 Senate hearing if he was the anonymous source for the Wall Street Journal story, or had authorized others to leak information. Comey stated that “he did not authorize leaking information regarding the FBI’s investigations into President Donald Trump or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”
COMEY VS. MCCABE: WHICH ONE WAS TELLING THE TRUTH?
More than three years later, at a September 30, 2020, Senate hearing, Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas noted that Comey’s former deputy at the FBI, Andrew McCabe, “who works for you, has publicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it. And, that you directly authorized it.” Cruz then asked Comey, “Who’s telling the truth?” Comey responded by testifying that he stood by his 2017 testimony denying any responsibility for the leak.
In March 2018, McCabe was fired as Deputy Director of the FBI by then-Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions, based upon a report by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, which blamed McCabe for the leak to the Wall Street Journal and for repeatedly lying about it to federal agents. However, McCabe was never criminally indicted on that charge. In 2021, McCabe reached a settlement with the Justice Department over a lawsuit he brought for the wrongful termination of his employment with the FBI, and which formally cleared McCabe of any wrongdoing.
However, as Senator Cruz explained last week in a social media post, “Comey and McCabe’s statements are irreconcilably contradictory. Whoever is lying under oath is committing a federal crime — and that’s what Comey has been indicted for.”
According to court documents, Comey is accused of “willfully and knowingly making a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement” in Congress “by falsely stating to a U.S. Senator [Cruz] during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that he had not ‘authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports’ regarding an FBI investigation concerning” Mr. Trump.
In the second criminal count of the indictment, Comey is accused of “corruptly endeavor[ing] to influence, obstruct and impede the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which an investigation was being had before the Senate Judiciary Committee by making false and misleading statements before that committee.”
TRUMP CELEBRATES COMEY’S INDICTMENT AS A TRIUMPH FOR JUSTICE
Trump celebrated Comey’s indictment last week on social media by declaring, “JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” He wrote that, “One of the worst human beings this country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI…
“He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation,” Trump added.
Trump also told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House, the day after Comey was indicted, that the Comey case was “about justice, not revenge. There’ll be others. I mean, they’re corrupt.” Trump then added later: “You can’t let this go on. They are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it.”
COMEY CLAIMS HE IS INNOCENT AND EAGER FOR HIS TRIAL
In a video posted on Instagram shortly after his indictment was announced last week, Comey said that he had expected such retribution from the president: “My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees and you [the American people] shouldn’t either. . .
“I hope instead, you are engaged, you are paying attention, and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does.”
Comey also said, “My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system. I’m innocent, so let’s have a trial and keep the faith.”
Comey’s indictment prompted a storm of criticism from the anti-Trump mainstream news media, as well as leading congressional Democrats. They noted that Trump had fired the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, whom he had appointed on an interim basis, for declining to bring criminal charges against Comey because of what he told his colleagues was the lack of sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction. According to the Wall Street Journal, Attorney General Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche tried to defend Siebert by arguing to Trump that he had been effectively executing Trump’s tough-on-crime and immigration agenda. But Trump ignored their pleas and told reporters about Siebert, “I want him out.”
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Trump personally intervened after being privately told by Ed Martin, a Justice Department official, that Siebert and other federal prosecutors were deliberately slow-walking the investigation into the cases against Trump critics, and, in Comey’s case, allowing the statute of limitations to expire before taking it to court. That is why a frustrated Trump wrote in a social-media post addressed to Attorney General Bondi, “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
TRUMP REPLACES JUSTICE DEPARTMENT PROSECUTOR WITH HIS OWN LAWYER
Trump then appointed a new interim prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, to take Siebert’s place. She was serving as a Trump White House aide and had previously served as one of Trump’s personal attorneys, but her experience was mostly as an insurance lawyer, and she had no prior prosecutorial experience. Nevertheless, with support from Bondi and Blanche, Halligan rapidly did her homework on the case and was able to get the federal grand jury, which had been hearing testimony against Comey, to issue the two-count criminal indictment a few days before reaching the five-year expiration date of the federal statute of limitations.
Trump’s Democrat political enemies called the indictment of Comey a dangerous abuse of his presidential powers.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren posted that “using the justice system to go after political opponents is what dictators do.”
Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy says we are “IN” a constitutional crisis, and it’s time for political leaders to choose a side: “democracy or autocracy.”
Maryland Congressman Rep. Jamie Raskin, who was a leading member of the outrageously partisan January 6 Select Committee and both Democrat impeachment proceedings against Trump, claimed that the Comey indictment was part of Trump’s “wrath and vengeance campaign.”
Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that, “President Trump wears his corruption like a badge of honor and defies anyone daring to challenge him.” He also said that, “The attorney general [Pam Bondi] willingly complies with every order from the White House.”
TRUMP LOYALISTS TAKING OVER THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
His critics also accuse President Trump of ousting the federal prosecutors who worked on the Biden-era Justice Department investigations into Trump and his allies and replacing them with his loyalists like Halligan. They, in turn, have abandoned the ongoing investigations into Trump’s allies started during the Biden administration and launched new investigations, like the one against Comey, into Trump’s political foes. In addition, back in July, the former FBI director’s daughter, Maurene Comey, who had been a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, was summarily dismissed from her post with no explanation other than a supervisor telling her that the decision “came from Washington.”
There have also been reports of a similar housecleaning within the ranks of the FBI, under its new director, Kash Patel, and at the behest of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, to remove those agents and senior officials who led the FBI’s Obama and Biden-era investigations of Trump.
Trump Justice Department officials reject the accusation that Comey’s indictment was politically motivated. Attorney General Pam Bondi said it “reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case.”
However, the indictment of Comey did make waves within the U.S. attorney’s office of Eastern Virginia in the form of an angry one-sentence letter of resignation sent to Halligan by Troy Edwards, who is Comey’s son-in-law. In it, Edwards said that he was quitting his job “to uphold my oath to the Constitution and the country.”
FBI Director Kash Patel said the indictment of Comey fulfills “a promise of full accountability” for the weaponization and politicization of law enforcement against Trump, which, Patel said, was “nowhere more blatant than during the Russiagate hoax, a disgraceful chapter in history we continue to investigate and expose.”
MORE EVIDENCE AGAINST COMEY SURFACES
Legal experts noted that the grand jury’s indictment of Comey lacked full details of the accusations against him and suggested that it may be followed by more information and additional charges against Comey before the case goes to trial. Comey is scheduled to appear for his initial arraignment on October 9 before U.S. District Court Judge Michael Nachmanoff in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Alexandria, Virginia.
According to veteran investigative reporter Catherine Herridge, who has worked as a senior correspondent for both CBS News and Fox News, recently declassified information uncovered by an FBI investigation called “Arctic Haze,” which was disclosed by Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, reveals more evidence against Comey. It shows that James Rybicki, the former FBI Chief of Staff, James Baker, the former FBI General Counsel, as well as Andrew McCabe, and Daniel Richman, have all said that they “coordinated media leaks [designed to discredit Trump] at Comey’s direction.” That directly contradicts Comey’s 2020 testimony in answer to Senator Cruz’s question, which is the basis for one of the counts in the indictment against him.
NY TIMES EDITORIAL ACCUSES TRUMP OF A LAW ENFORCEMENT SCANDAL
A harsh, one-sided New York Times editorial declared that long before Comey’s indictment, “Mr. Trump crossed some of the clearest and most important lines in how justice is administered. He ran for office promising to prosecute his enemies and appointed loyalists who have ordered investigations of people the president does not like. On their own, those moves deserved to be the biggest law enforcement scandal of the past 50 years. Yet they turned out to be just a start. He has now gone beyond ordering investigations to dictating their outcome.”
The editorial then compared Trump’s use of the criminal justice system to seek retribution against his political enemies who did the same thing to him first, to the complaints by America’s Founding Fathers against Britain’s King George for prosecuting Americans for “pretended offenses,” as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.
The New York Times editorial also blamed Trump for dismantling the non-partisan reforms to the operations of the Justice Department that were established in the wake of the Watergate scandal 50 years ago. Those reforms gave DOJ officials and prosecutors more political independence than any other part of the executive branch.
BIDEN POLITICIZED THE DOJ FIRST
However, the editorial refused to recognize that Trump was only continuing a partisan process that was started by the Biden administration. That was epitomized by the fierce federal criminal prosecutions and cruel treatment of more than 1,200 Trump supporters, the vast majority of whom were passive and peaceful participants in the January 6, 2021, protest against the disputed outcome of the 2020 presidential election, which then evolved into the riot at the Capitol Building.
The Biden administration’s politicization of the Justice Department was also demonstrated by its policy statement demonizing parents who wanted a say in their children’s curriculum at local public school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.” Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, also refused to provide protection to the conservative justices at the U.S. Supreme Court after their safety was threatened by left-wing extremists enraged by their ruling that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Garland also permitted these activists to harass the justices and their family members by staging protests outside their homes in violation of federal law. In June 2022, Nicholas Roske, of Simi Valley, California, was arrested as a would-be assassin and pleaded guilty to attempting to murder Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, after staking out his home in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C.
The NY Times editorial also accused Trump of removing “any pretense that the law is blind [and]. . . persecuting people he considers his enemies, with little justification other than raw political power.”
TRUMP’S CRITICS WERE SILENT WHEN HE WAS THE VICTIM OF LAWFARE
However, these same critics, as well as the New York Times editorial board, were silent when senior officials of the Biden Justice Department and the FBI, as well as state and local Democrat elected officials across the country, used the same lawfare tactics to convict Trump on dozens of felony counts on much flimsier evidence of guilt. Almost all of Trump’s criminal and civil losses in court have since been dismissed upon appeal or have been dropped, in part, due to several pro-Trump rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, and, in the Georgia case, unethical practices by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis.
There is no doubt that Trump is now eager for legal retribution against the enemies who smeared his reputation with the Russian collusion hoax, tried to remove him from the White House, twice, with failed impeachment efforts, then tried to disqualify him from running for president again in 2024, bankrupt his business and throw him in jail on highly dubious federal and state criminal charges. But it also must be remembered that his political enemies used these lawfare tactics against Trump and his political allies first, which resulted in the jailing of some of his closest political allies, including trade representative Peter Navarro and White House advisor Steve Bannon. Trump’s first National Security advisor, General Michael Flynn, also fell victim to an ambush interview that was deliberately set up by FBI director James Comey in a successful effort to ensnare the politically naive, newly appointed Flynn in a perjury trap that engulfed the Trump administration in scandal from its outset in January 2017.
Conservative commentator Roger Kimball, writing on the American Greatness website, notes the irony in the fact that Comey is now being prosecuted under the same federal statute, USC 18 §1001, which prohibits making “any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement” to a government official. It is the same law that Comey and federal prosecutors then used to bankrupt General Flynn in an attempt to pressure him into giving damaging testimony against Donald Trump. Flynn resisted that pressure, but at a huge cost to himself and his family. He was eventually forced to agree to enter into a guilty plea deal with federal prosecutors, which he later repudiated. Flynn would eventually receive a full pardon from President Trump at the end of his first term as president.
Comey was so confident that he would be immune to any backlash that he later told a live audience how he deliberately lured Flynn into an ambush interview that became what is known as a perjury trap. Comey said he recognized that during the first days of the Trump administration, it was so disorganized that the normal procedural and legal safeguards for its officials were not yet in place. So he just called Flynn on the phone and said that he was sending over a couple of FBI agents for an informal chat. Comey also assured Flynn that there was no need for an administration lawyer to be present to protect Flynn’s rights, which was standard practice for such interviews. As a result, Flynn did not realize that he was the target of an FBI investigation, and that he was being set up for perjury charges when the FBI agents asked him detailed questions about a phone conversation that had been intercepted and transcribed by a U.S. intelligence agency between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, in which they discussed newly imposed U.S. sanctions against Russia.
Kimball notes that “There is no doubt that Trump is going after… those of his opponents who went after him and his associates… the point to appreciate is that Trump’s goal is not vengeance, but rather the righting of a wrong.
THE DEEP STATE WAR AGAINST ALL THINGS TRUMP
“For years, the deep state waged war against all things Trump. Its agents sought to bankrupt Trump, to jail him. Was anyone surprised when at least two gunmen took the hint and tried to assassinate this ‘fascist,’ this ‘Hitler,’ this extreme threat to ‘the very foundations of our republic’?
“The political establishment was bent on destroying Trump,” Kimball wrote. “Moreover, they had every reason to believe that they would succeed. Hence, the unbridled nature of their fury. They would rid themselves of [Trump] and all his works one way or the other, ‘by any means necessary.’ They would never be called to account. Or so they thought.”
But, Kimball observes, “Against the odds, Trump not only survived but also triumphed. But in the course of their scorched-earth campaign against Trump,” his enemies defied all of the “usual rules and conventions” of conventional politics. They also destroyed the credibility of the mainstream news media, which repeated their false accusations and hysterical allegations against both him and his followers, falsely labeling them as “threats to democracy” and “domestic terrorists” for publicly stating their political beliefs.
COMEY’S ROLE IN THE 2003 VALERIE PLAME CIA LEAK SCANDAL
Earlier in his Justice Department career, while James Comey was serving as the acting attorney general in December 2003, he named his longtime friend Patrick Fitzgerald as the special counsel investigating the leak to the media, which compromised covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Fitzgerald prosecuted and convicted then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, in an effort to embarrass the George W. Bush administration, even after he learned that Plame’s identity was originally leaked to columnist Robert Novak by then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was never prosecuted because of his close association with the then-very popular Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
More than 20 years later, Patrick Fitzgerald is now serving as one of Comey’s defense attorneys.
According to a Wall Street Journal editorial, which laments the fact that Comey failed to follow their advice in January 2017 to resign as FBI director at that time, “Mr. Comey’s great flaw as a prosecutor was his righteous streak. Time and again, it led him to awful judgments that hurt individuals and the country.”
COMEY MAY HAVE BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR TRUMP’S 2016 VICTORY
“In the greatest irony, his October intervention in the 2016 election to reopen the classified document case against Hillary Clinton helped Mr. Trump win that close election. He has that on his conscience — not that he seems given to much self-reflection.”
There is no doubt that Comey and other senior FBI officials deliberately spread lies about Trump’s ties to Russia in a failed attempt to enable Clinton to defeat him in the 2016 election, and then eagerly sought evidence to justify his removal by impeachment after he took office.
Wall Street Journal commentator Holman Jenkins also notes that, “James Comey’s real crime was bad judgment,” especially his ill-considered interventions, which probably changed the course of the 2016 presidential election and its ironic result.”
Jenkins writes that, “The great unmentionable is that the only beneficiary [of those actions] was Donald Trump, who likely wouldn’t have won in 2016 without Mr. Comey’s serial interventions, culminating in his chaotic reopening of the Hillary Clinton email investigation [just a few days] before Election Day.”
Jenkins also suggests that the recently released classified appendices to the Department of Justice inspector general and special counsel investigations of Comey’s actions may be able to answer the question of whether Comey was “improperly exploiting his intelligence authorities to meddle in a presidential election with his insubordinate July 5, 2016, press conference.
In an unprecedented 15-minute presentation, Comey ended the FBI’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s private email server, which had been conducted with “kid gloves.” Even though Comey said that Mrs. Clinton’s “extremely careless” handling of her classified emails had violated federal statutes, Comey exceeded his authority by declaring that “a reasonable prosecutor would bring” a criminal case against her, clearing her path to the Democrat presidential nomination at the party’s national convention later that month.
COMEY THOUGHT HE WAS SAFE BECAUSE HE EXPECTED CLINTON TO WIN
According to Jenkins, “the truest thing Mr. Comey has said about his actions is that he expected Mrs. Clinton to win and therefore his actions would never be closely examined.”
“Worse,” Jenkins adds, “Mr. Comey’s FBI would next make itself a vehicle for legitimizing fake intelligence about Trump-Russia connections, which had the effect after the election of distracting from Mr. Comey’s catastrophic meddling.”
“Unfortunately,” Jenkins concludes, “the law offers no obvious remedy for intelligence officials who misuse their powers as he did. An honest airing in the public square might at least discourage the use [by President Trump] of criminal prosecutions as an alternative to political redress. But for that, we’d need an honest and forthright press, and we don’t have one.”
The Trump administration’s attempts to hold his most vocal critics legally accountable were also cheered by John Eastman, who served as one of President Trump’s attorneys who challenged the legality of the outcome of the 2020 election, for which Eastman has been indicted in Georgia and Arizona, and recommended for disbarment in California.
Eastman writes in a New York Post op-ed that he has no tears to shed for Trump’s opponents who spread “the utterly false ‘insurrection’ narrative generated in the wake of the 2020 election that targeted not just the president but scores of electors, attorneys (myself included) and numerous other Trump supporters — tarnishing reputations, depleting bank accounts and threatening decades in prison.”
FBI VETERAN CALLS COMEY A SELF-RIGHTEOUS HYPOCRITE
Another bitterly anti-Comey op-ed published by the New York Post was written by James Gagliano, who served for 25 years as an FBI agent and retired in 2016. He starts by saying that Comey’s “pious, sanctimonious self-righteousness and hypocritical moralizing had long ago cost him his professional reputation.”
He writes that Comey’s “tenure as FBI director, blessedly, was relatively short — less than four years. . .
“Consumed from the beginning with his legacy, he failed to sense the obvious character flaws within his inner circle of hand-picked acolytes. . .
“Many of us at first bought the myth of “Cardinal Comey” — a leader of considerable probity and moral rectitude. [But] it was a lie,” Gagliano writes sadly.
He adds that, “Other contributing factors in Comey’s fall from grace: arrogance and mendacity.”
As an example of the latter, Gagliano cited a Comey “interview on ABC News in 2018, [in which] he pretended not to know that the Steele dossier. . . had been deemed garbage by the Intelligence Community, including [his own intelligence experts at] the FBI.”
Gagliano’s closing sentiment was directed at Comey, declaring that, “You’ve embarrassed not only yourself, but the entire FBI. Please just go away.”
TRUMP’S ENEMIES FED LIES TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
In his comments on Comey’s indictment and his attacks on Trump’s legitimacy, Chicago-based columnist and podcaster John Kass notes at the outset that “[President Barack] Obama was behind it, of course. But his Deep State ‘rats,’ the FBI’s Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, carried the lies directed from Obama’s White House and used their contacts in [the] corporate legacy media establishment to sell the lies. And the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, and the rest fed those lies to the American people.”
As Kass notes, “The Deep State can’t exist if they don’t have supportive media shoveling Deep State lies. It was all about undercutting President Donald Trump. And we all watched as America was torn apart.”
Kass also quotes extensively from an article published on The Federalist website by Shawn Fleetwood, who writes that, “Roughly a month after Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 election, President Obama ordered his intel chiefs — including Comey — to put together an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) [whose goal was] to identify ‘Russian activities and intentions in recent U.S. elections.’ The ICA came away with the conclusion that ‘Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.’
“The CIA and Comey-led FBI expressed ‘high confidence’ in that judgment, while the NSA expressed ‘moderate confidence.’
“As revealed in a declassified 2020 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report. . . that central claim — which was foundational in Democrats’ destructive Trump-Russia hoax — was based on weak and uncorroborated intel. Meanwhile, intelligence contradicting that central claim was [deliberately] left out of the ICA altogether.”
Fleetwood declares that, “The goal in crafting the ICA, as is now glaringly apparent, was to give validity to the Clinton-manufactured narrative that Trump colluded with Moscow to steal the 2016 election.
“The declassified [House] report further contradicted claims made by Comey and other Obama intel chiefs that salacious and false information from the infamous Steele dossier was not included in the main body of the ICA.”
HOW COMEY ENGINEERED MEDIA ACCEPTANCE OF THE STEELE DOSSIER
However, when Comey participated in Trump’s first high-level security briefing as president-elect, on January 6, 2017, the FBI director insisted on telling him about the salacious allegations in the Steele dossier. That gave the dossier an aura of authenticity it had previously lacked, and fanned the flames of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax in the mainstream media.
The FBI used the phony dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele as the blueprint for its investigation into Trump. The dossier was based entirely on unconfirmed rumors from Steele’s Russian informants. The dossier was secretly funded and created as a political dirty trick by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in an attempt to smear Trump as a Russian agent. It falsely claimed that Trump was cooperating with the Russians because they had potentially damaging personal information, which they were effectively using to blackmail him.
Fleetwood also noted that Comey personally vouched for the credibility of the Steele dossier when he told Congress in September 2020 that “It was significant enough and consistent enough with other intelligence that it ought to be included” in the ICA, even though other U.S. government intelligence agencies in late 2016 considered the dossier to be unreliable.
Fleetwood concludes that, “The Russia collusion hoax is arguably one of the most harmful and damning scandals in U.S. history — and none of it would have been made possible without corrupt intel hacks like Comey.”
Comey was appointed FBI director by President Obama in 2013. Comey launched the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russians, known as Crossfire Hurricane, in July 2016, in the midst of the presidential campaign. Documents recently made public by the Trump administration show that top officials in the Obama-era FBI and intelligence community were determined to stop Trump from winning the 2016 election, and continued to plot to remove Trump from office for months after his inauguration as president.
Senior FBI officials, including Comey, personally vouched for the false allegations in the Steele dossier to persuade the judges in the secret FISA court to issue four warrants, from October 2016 to April 2017, for the surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, who was falsely suspected of being a Trump campaign contact with the Russians.
HOW COMEY TOOK HIS REVENGE AFTER TRUMP FIRED HIM
After Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Comey persuaded Trump to keep him on at that post based upon a promise of personal loyalty, which Comey quickly broke after Trump fired him in May 2017. Comey then sought to take his revenge against Trump by arranging for a leak through a friend, Columbia University professor Daniel Richmond, to the New York Times of compromising details from a private conversation Comey had with Trump, in which Trump allegedly asked Comey to go easy in the FBI investigation of Trump’s former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. That request was then used as the basis of an accusation by Trump’s enemies that he was guilty of interfering with the Flynn investigation.
The resulting New York Times story, which pushed the false narrative of Trump’s collusion with the Russians in the 2016 election, precipitated congressional calls for the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller to investigate Trump on the potentially impeachable charges of collusion with the Russians and obstruction of justice.
OTHER TARGETS FOR PROSECUTION ON TRUMP’S ENEMIES LIST
After his re-election to a second term as president last November, Trump called for “retribution” against those senior Obama administration officials, including Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who secretly used their government power to investigate Trump’s alleged contacts with the Russians during the 2016 campaign, and continued to accuse Trump of collusion with the Russians during his first term as president. Trump was eventually exonerated of those charges, and an additional charge of obstruction of justice for firing Comey as FBI director, when a two-year-long FBI investigation led by special prosecutor Robert Mueller failed to find sufficient evidence to substantiate the accusations.
Trump has also publicly called for his Justice Department under Bondi to prosecute other political enemies. One is Democrat California Senator Adam Schiff, who repeatedly claimed during Trump’s first term as president that he had seen evidence, that he never produced, proving that Trump did collude with the Russians.
Another target of Trump’s desire for retribution is Letitia James, who made a campaign promise when she ran for New York State Attorney General to prosecute Trump for unspecified “crimes.” As state attorney general, James would succeed in gaining a legally dubious felony conviction against Trump in a New York State court for the common practice of overvaluing his property in a loan application to a bank, even though the bank never complained and the loan was eventually fully repaid. Nevertheless, the judge hearing the case complied with the request by James to order Trump to pay a fine so large that it could have bankrupted his business. That fine was later thrown out in an appeal to a higher court for being unreasonable.
Federal prosecutors are now reportedly considering bringing charges against both Schiff and James, accusing them of mortgage fraud. That is also the basis upon which President Trump is attempting to dismiss Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, which is now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court. James, Schiff, and Cook have all denied the accusation of financial wrongdoing against them.
According to a Washington Post report, the mortgage fraud accusations are pushed by Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and Trump ally Ed Martin, a senior Justice Department official who leads its “Weaponization Working Group.”
INVESTIGATING THE LEFT-WING CAUSES SUPPORTED BY GEORGE SOROS
The Trump administration has also reportedly instructed federal investigators in more than half a dozen cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York City, to consider filing criminal charges of racketeering, material support for terrorism, and arson against the Open Society Foundation, supported by liberal multi-billionaire investor George Soros.
Soros’ foundation has been harshly criticized by Trump and his supporters for its major contributions to the election campaigns of soft-on-crime district attorneys across the country who have mostly refused to sentence convicted criminals to long jail time. Soros’ foundation has also reportedly financed many of the organizations providing support to the millions of illegal immigrants who poured through President Biden’s open borders. This is in addition to Trump’s requests for federal investigations of other extreme left-wing organizations, such as Antifa, that have been organizing violent attacks and demonstrations in cities and on college campuses across the country by anti-American and antisemitic leftist activists.
Senior federal prosecutors in Maryland were also reportedly under pressure from senior Justice Department officials to file a criminal complaint against John Bolton for the mishandling of classified material. Bolton served as Trump’s National Security Advisor for a year and a half during his first term, but became an outspoken critic of Trump after he was fired from that post in 2019.
The same report said that John Hooks, the head of the public corruption and fraud unit in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., recently offered to resign over a dispute with the Trump-appointed federal prosecutor for the D.C. region, Jeanine Pirro, involving multiple investigations, including the inquiry into the activities of the Soros-supported liberal organizations. Hooks later agreed to stay at his office through October to clear up the cases still on his desk, only to be informed a few days later that he was being fired immediately.
In the meantime, Attorney General Bondi is vigorously moving forward with the FBI and Justice Department investigations that Trump has requested. She told Fox News commentator Sean Hannity that the Comey indictment “is just the beginning.
“Whether you’re a former FBI director, whether you’re a former head of an intel community, whether you are a current state or local elected official, whether you’re a billionaire funding organizations to try to keep Donald Trump out of office, everything is on the table,” the attorney general warned.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR POLITICIZING THE AMERICAN JUSTICE SYSTEM?
In its editorial, the New York Times seeks to lay the entire blame for the politicization of the nation’s criminal justice system on President Trump. It also bemoans the failure of almost all elected Republicans to speak out “against Mr. Trump’s manipulation of prosecutorial power” or to hold congressional “investigative hearings and issue subpoenas, which would signal to all Americans that Mr. Trump is threatening the fabric of our society.”
The editorial concludes by stating that “misusing the power to imprison people is uniquely chilling in a free society. Our country has entered a grave new period of injustice.”
However, the mainstream media refuses to recognize the destructive role played by Trump’s political enemies in the Obama and Biden administrations, who were first to misuse their power over the American criminal justice system on the federal, state, and local levels to advance their political agendas. Along the way, they imposed strict censorship, denying their political opponents the opportunity to deliver their message to the American people on social media and traditional news media, deliberately and repeatedly misled the American public, and destroyed the credibility and journalistic objectivity of the mainstream news media.
Until both sides recognize that their actions are undermining American democracy and weakening the social fabric of holding the country together, it will be very difficult to restore the respect of the American people in the integrity of their elected government leaders and the inherent, underlying fairness of our society and institutions of justice.
