Comey charges may have been predictable, but it’s a crisis nonetheless

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Washington: And so it begins.

The indictment of former FBI director James Comey is surely only the start of US President Donald Trump’s long-promised campaign of retribution against his enemies: a lengthy and varied list of people who will feel uneasy as they go to sleep tonight.

In the president’s defence, you can’t say he ever hid his intentions.

Donald Trump’s preoccupation with former FBI director James Comey has never faded.

Comey, who handled the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia in 2016, was sacked by Trump in 2017. The following year, less than halfway through his first term, the president was pushing for the Justice Department to lay charges.

“James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR,” Trump ranted on Twitter, as it was then known, in April 2018. “He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH.”

Trump went on to call Comey a “weak and untruthful slime ball”, and a terrible FBI director who botched the investigation into former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails.

In August of that year, Trump took aim at Jeff Sessions, tweeting that the then attorney-general should “look into all of the corruption on the ‘other side’ including [Clinton’s] deleted Emails, Comey lies & leaks”.

“Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!” Trump posted. Three months later, Sessions was fired.

Even under new leadership, the Justice Department ultimately declined to prosecute Comey, though it criticised him for violating policy on the handling of sensitive information pertaining to investigations.

But Trump’s preoccupation with the former FBI director – and all his other perceived enemies – never faded.

“When this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them,” he told Fox News in June 2024, directing his remarks mainly toward Joe Biden and the then-president’s family.

But Trump asserted that he wouldn’t do it because the country was at risk of becoming a banana republic, with politicians weaponising the justice system to go after their enemies.

“What’s happened to me has never happened in this country before, and it has to stop,” he said. “It has to stop because otherwise we’re not going to have a country … we can’t have this stuff go on.”

Trump might draw a distinction between going after a politician such as Biden and pursuing someone such as Comey, who was a public servant (and a Republican for most of his life). But the impression he gave in that interview – even as he used Comey and others to whip up outrage at his campaign rallies – was that he would rise above the temptation of lawfare.

Yet here we are.

Since becoming president, Trump has frequently complained about the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” – which is not actually a hoax – but only occasionally talked about revenge against his enemies. At least until last weekend, when he publicly criticised Attorney-General Pam Bondi for failing to press charges against Comey, New York Attorney-General Letitia James and Democratic senator from California Adam Schiff.

The extraordinary intervention, in the form of a Truth Social post directed at Bondi, heaped enormous pressure on the supposedly independent attorney-general and Justice Department to bring forth an indictment.

Bondi, it seems, was not about to make the same mistake Sessions did in 2018. And she had little choice after Trump installed one of his own former lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, to be US attorney in the district that would bring the charges (against the advice of prosecutors).

Democrats, anticipating this day would come, grilled Bondi at her confirmation hearing in January on whether she would bow to pressure from the White House when it came to prosecuting political enemies.

The former Florida attorney-general was never explicit in her answers, but she did say that “politics [would] not play a part” in her decisions, and suggested she would be willing to resign rather than do something improper.

Given her actions this week, Bondi’s undertakings to the Senate seem as trustworthy as Trump’s comments to Fox News in June 2024.

Democratic senator Mark Warner said it was “a sad, sad day”, and that Trump is “openly and nakedly trying to weaponise our justice system”. His colleague Chris Murphy was more blunt.

“We aren’t on a slippery slope to a constitutional crisis. We are IN the crisis,” Murphy posted on X. “Time for leaders – political leaders, business leaders, civic leaders – to pick a side: democracy or autocracy?”

And of Trump’s weekend post demanding Bondi bring the charges, Murphy added: “Rarely are the corruption documents made public by the perpetrators.”

It can be difficult to perceive something as a crisis when it is so predictable, and has been so well telegraphed. But when America wakes tomorrow, that surely must be the appraisal.

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