The Trump administration's criminal indictment of former FBI Director James Comey has earned a scathing assessment from the editorial board of the conservative National Review.
The "political animus" driving the case, the board wrote, "pale[s] in comparison to the incompetence of the Trump Justice Department’s execution of the lawfare ordered by the president."
Trump, through his newly appointed prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, installed to replace the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who could not find the evidence to move forward, has strong-armed the Justice Department into charging Comey with perjury and obstruction of justice, based on testimony he gave to the Senate years ago that was misquoted in the indictment.
"The 36-year-old Halligan is a former insurance lawyer; prior to the grand jury presentation, she had never been a prosecutor in a criminal case," wrote the board. "It shows. The perjury count appears deeply flawed. The charge is difficult to decipher because it is not merely terse (many indictments set forth only 'bare bones' charging language, rather than narrations), but scant in its description of what Comey allegedly lied about."
The specific matter the Trump administration claims Comey lied about, noted the board, appears to be "former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s October 2016 leak to the Wall Street Journal of information about the bureau’s then-ongoing Clinton Foundation investigation. That’s discernible because the indictment quotes a senator as having asked if Comey 'authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports' about the Clinton or Trump investigations" — that senator being Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), according to contemporary transcripts — and Comey denied having done so.
There are discrepancies between Comey and McCabe's account of the matter, noted the board, and inspector general Michael Horowitz investigated that and found it likely Comey was truthful — but this is "beside the point," the board noted, because that's not even what the indictment alleges.
Rather, the board says, the indictment claims "that Comey falsely denied authorizing the leak. But McCabe, who admitted to authorizing the leak, never claimed that Comey authorized it. Comey cannot legitimately be convicted absent proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he truly believed he himself had authorized the leak, that he did authorize the leak, and that he therefore intentionally lied to the Senate when he denied it. Where’s the evidence of that?"
Even if the DOJ can get this case to trial without it being tossed at preliminary stages, the board noted, it would face problems, including that McCabe would have to be a central witness, and Horowitz previously recommended McCabe face prosecution for false statements about the leak, which in itself would constitute reasonable doubt over Comey lying.
Further underscoring Halligan's ineptitude, the board said, she also tried to bring a second perjury charge, alleging Comey falsely claimed not to have been told Hillary Clinton was the source of claims Trump colluded with the Russian government. But in reality, "what Comey said was that he could not recall the FBI’s getting a criminal referral about that matter from the CIA" — a completely different, and unprovable, thing from what Halligan claimed he said. So the grand jury wouldn't even let that charge proceed.
"This sorry place is where lawfare takes the nation," the board concluded, arguing that even if Trump has valid grievances about how the justice system targeted him, "turnabout is not fair play. Turnabout is a betrayal of the president’s responsibility to execute the laws faithfully. Turnabout is the president transforming James Comey into a martyr."