Trump’s Case Against James Comey Is Crashing and Burning

This was already an unusual move on the grand jury’s part; the cliche is that a decent prosecutor could get one to indict a ham sandwich. (Well, with some notable exceptions.) Prosecutors then revised the indictment to only include the other two charges. Instead of properly submitting that indictment to the grand jury again, they instead submitted the revised version to the court.

Lindsay Halligan, the rookie interim U.S. attorney for eastern Virginia, confirmed that the final indictment was only seen by the grand jury’s foreperson and another member when it was finalized on September 25. Federal prosecutors argued that it wasn’t a new indictment and that the charges were still valid. Comey’s lawyers, as you might imagine, took a much less forgiving view of the matter.

“There is no indictment,” Michael Dreeben, one of Comey’s lawyers, reportedly told Nachmanoff after the Justice Department’s admission. Though it might seem like a technicality, it is a huge one. The Fifth Amendment prohibits felony prosecutions “unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury.” As Comey’s legal team explained to the judge, the former FBI director was essentially being prosecuted under a new indictment that no grand jury had approved.

To understand how things got to this point, we must travel back in time to this summer. Trump had repeatedly pressured officials to bring criminal charges against figures like Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, the latter of whom was also indicted over dubious allegations of mortgage fraud in recent months. California Senator Adam Schiff and Representative Eric Swalwell, who both played a key role in Trump’s first-term impeachments, are facing similar investigations that have not yet resulted in charges.