Trump and Comey and the whirlpool of revenge politics

Trump meeting Comey in 2017: CBS News photo

Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted yesterday by a grand jury in Richmond, Virginia on two lame-o made up counts – perjury and obstruction of justice by committing perjury. The U.S. Attorney who went before the grand jury and presented the government’s case was Lindsey Halligan, whose only qualification for being anywhere near a grand jury is that she graduated from law school and passed the bar. She is in her job because she went to one of the museums in Washington D.C. earlier this year and took note of a display of art that mentioned race. She made a big deal of this, so Trump hired her to work in the White House and put her in charge of stripping DEI or woke or something anyway from museums in Washington. Halligan was the only signature on the indictment. The previous U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, whom Trump appointed, had refused to take the Comey case to the grand jury and was fired by Trump. Assistant U.S. attorneys in the office also would not participate in the prosecution of the former FBI Director.

But this column is not about Halligan, it’s about Donald Trump. Comey and Trump go way back to one of the early days of Trump’s first administration when Trump noticed him across a room full of DOJ and FBI people he was meeting. At Trump’s behest, Comey walked across the room and shook hands with Trump. Comey is very, very tall, like basketball player level tall. He towered over Trump. Trump doesn’t like to be towered over, so he invited Comey to the White House for a private dinner, during which he apparently planned on intimidating the very tall FBI director so he could keep Comey in line.

Trump infamously asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to him – to Trump – multiple times at the dinner. Comey demurred each time, finally pledging that he would always be honest in carrying out his job. Not long after that, while testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, in answering a question from a congressman, Comey said that the FBI had had the Trump campaign and Trump himself under investigation for its contacts with Russians since July of 2016. Trump fired Comey, who still had six or seven years left on his 10 year term as FBI director, and then he threw a fit when he learned that Comey, on the day he was fired, had been in Los Angeles on FBI business and flew on the official FBI Gulfstream jet back to Washington to clear out his desk.

Comey gave congressional testimony damaging to Trump and continued to speak out about his abuses of power for nearly a decade. Trump has been bellowing about Comey ever since. I’m sure you have seen some of his recent bellowing – Comey is “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to,” “he has been bad for this country for so long,” Come is “a dirty cop,” and on and on.

Asked about the indictment of Comey at a press availability at the White House, Trump claimed not to know anything about it. Later, he crowed that Comey is “a destroyer of lives” and that he must “pay a very big price” for lying.

Everything that Trump has said about Comey, especially his statement that he is “guilty as hell,” will be used by Comey’s attorney when he files a motion to dismiss the indictment for selective and vindictive prosecution. Legal experts are saying there is ample evidence in Trump’s own statements to prove vindictive prosecution, so it is thought that Comey will prevail with that motion.

Donald Trump has a lot of problems. Comey is just one of them. Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is coming back to bite him in his copious ass.

But one of the biggest problems Trump has is getting competent lawyers to work for him. Halligan is just the latest example of this problem. Kash Patel is another. His posts on X about the killing of Charlie Kirk were out of control. He has been regularly flying back and forth to Las Vegas on the official FBI Gulfstream for unknown reasons ever since he took office. Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, managed to bury Trump under a blizzard of Epstein mania with a single statement at a cabinet meeting that amounted to dismissing the entire Epstein matter as a nothing-burger. The DOJ under her alleged “leadership” has shed hundreds of experienced attorneys who have worked there for years.

Donald Trump wants to wreak vengeance on his enemies. He treats the Department of Justice as if it’s his personal Department of Retribution. No president in our history has used his position to punish his political enemies like Trump has. Not even Nixon attempted anything even approaching what Trump is doing. Trump wants to use the DOJ to prosecute donors to the Democratic Party such as George Soros, whose only offense is supporting the political party that opposes Trump. He is going after his former national security adviser and U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, because Bolton wrote a book that Trump didn’t like. The FBI has already searched Bolton’s home and office, and there are reports that he will be indicted for some sort of offense involving retention of classified information, with which Trump has much experience.

Trump’s obsession with revenge puts us all at risk. If he can indict James Comey and put a target on the back of Senator Adam Schiff because he ran one of the two impeachments of Trump, none of us is safe.

Trump associates his ability to punish his political enemies with power. The power he has as president is vast because it is written into the Constitution and because he has been able to so completely control one of the two political parties in this country that it will do anything he tells it to do.

Trump’s campaign of revenge is going to backfire on him. It has already cost him much of the professional cadre of the Department of Justice that he needs to carry out his revenge campaign, because skilled top officials in the department have either resigned or been fired. So, Trump is left with the likes of the inexperienced Halligan as acting U.S. attorney in Virginia and the equally incompetent Alina Habba as acting U.S. Attorney in New Jersey.

At some point, it is going to occur to at least some of those currently working in the Trump administration that revenge cuts both ways: The next Democrat who becomes president will have the same prosecutorial powers Trump has arrogated to himself. Republicans who are out of power the next time the political worm turns could be subjected to investigations by a new FBI director and a new attorney general who are likely to remember what was done to otherwise innocent former government officials by Donald Trump and his revenge puppets.

Our politics could be consumed by a whirlpool of revenge and counter-revenge and counter-counter-revenge that will drive competent people out of government service because they don’t want to risk being destroyed by the political storm wrought by Donald Trump.

You would think that at some point, cooler heads might prevail, and things could go back to something approaching political normalcy.

And then you look at the current cast of characters on the Supreme Court and the political party that put them there and the ruling they made that presidents are beyond the law, and all the crap they’re doing with the “shadow docket,” and you think…

Not.