Trump fired Comey in 2017, early in his first term in office. He has since regularly assailed Comey’s handling of the FBI investigation that detailed contacts between Russians and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Since Trump returned to office last January, his Justice Department has been examining Comey’s 2020 testimony when he addressed Republican criticisms of the Russia investigation and denied that he had authorised disclosures of sensitive information to the news media.
The indictment alleges that Comey misled Congress by claiming he had not authorised anyone else to be an anonymous source in news reporting about an FBI investigation.
US Attorney-General Pam Bondi.Credit: AP
Trump’s administration has carried out a sweeping campaign to remake the Justice Department, which the president alleges was used as a political weapon when he left office in 2021. Trump faced federal charges of mishandling classified documents and trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat. Both cases have been dropped.
“Donald Trump has ordered the criminal prosecutions of political targets, and the Department of Justice is corruptly obeying,” said Norm Eisen, a prominent former government ethics official under Democratic president Barack Obama and currently a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “This indictment has all the hallmarks of a vindictive and meritless prosecution.”
The effort to target Comey had been viewed with scepticism in the Eastern District of Virginia, the US attorney’s office handling the case.
After the district’s top federal prosecutor, Erik Siebert, resigned last week, others in the office told his successor, Lindsey Halligan, that charges should not be filed due to a lack of evidence, according to a source. Career prosecutors in the office also previously drafted a memo urging Halligan not to seek an indictment, saying the case lacked evidence to establish probable cause that a crime was committed, Reuters previously reported.
Comey’s indictment.Credit: AP
Underscoring the weakness of the case, the grand jury on Thursday (Friday AEST) declined to indict Comey on a third proposed charge, originally listed as count one of the indictment, of making a false statement to Congress in a different part of his Senate testimony stemming from a question related to the 2016 presidential election, court records show.
Prosecutors evaluating whether Comey lied to Congress during testimony on September 30, 2020, only had until Tuesday to bring a case before the five-year statute of limitations expired.
Halligan most recently served as a White House adviser, and before that was one of Trump’s personal defence lawyers.
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In a highly unusual move, Halligan personally presented the evidence to the grand jury on Thursday – a task typically performed by a line prosecutor and not the US attorney, according to four people briefed on the matter.
Comey’s son-in-law, Troy Edwards, resigned from his position as a senior national security prosecutor following the news on Thursday, saying he was doing so to uphold his “oath to the Constitution and country”, according to a copy of his resignation letter seen by Reuters.
Comey’s eldest daughter, Maureen Comey, was fired from her job as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan in July. She filed a lawsuit earlier this month, with her lawyers saying in the complaint that she was fired “solely or substantially because her father is former FBI director James B. Comey”.
Trump and Comey have had an acrimonious relationship since the start of the president’s first term. Trump fired him as FBI director days after Comey publicly confirmed that the president was under investigation over his election campaign’s connections to Russia. Comey then emerged as a prominent critic of the president, calling him “morally unfit” for office.
Comey’s firing led to another former FBI chief, Robert Mueller, being appointed as a special counsel to take charge of the Russia probe, which unearthed numerous contacts between the campaign and Russian officials, but concluded that there was not enough evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy.
Trump repeatedly attacked the investigation as a “witch hunt.” His second administration has sought to undermine conclusions by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in which Trump defeated Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
A Justice Department internal watchdog found evidence of numerous errors but no political bias concerning the FBI’s opening of the investigation. Republicans have long claimed that the investigation was intended to undermine Trump’s first administration.
The Justice Department’s internal watchdog in a 2019 report faulted Comey for asking a friend to give memos detailing Comey’s one-on-one interactions with Trump to The New York Times. The Justice Department during Trump’s first term declined to pursue criminal charges against Comey.
Reuters, AP
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