President Donald Trump's push to have his former FBI Director James Comey indicted this week astonished MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, who laid out the bizarre and unsettling state of affairs on Wednesday's edition of MSNBC's "The Weeknight."
"Let's remember, just days ago, Donald Trump demanded his attorney general prosecute his perceived political enemies, including Comey, as he raged online about the lack of criminal charges against them," said former RNC chief Michael Steele. "Ken, have you heard anything else since this report dropped this afternoon, especially in terms of the timeline we're talking about or looking at here?"
"Our reporting has now been confirmed by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post," said Dilanian. "And there seems to be a consensus ... that prosecutors intend to take this case before a grand jury in Virginia as early as Thursday. Because, as you said, they are racing to meet a deadline. The statute of limitations on this charge would lapse on Tuesday, five years to the day after Mr. Comey gave that testimony to Congress."
"It's not clear to us what the basis of these charges are, because this has been a disagreement between [former FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe and Comey about what happened here that's been aired in public for years," Dilanian continued. "And there was an inspector general report that looked closely at it. And what the inspector general report decided was that Comey was telling the truth, that Comey did not authorize McCabe to disclose this information to the Wall Street Journal."
"But let's take a step back and understand what's actually going on here, because it's really extraordinary," said Dilanian. "You have a U.S. attorney appointed by Donald Trump, a Republican, but also a career prosecutor who looked at this case and another case against the New York attorney general for mortgage fraud and said, I don't think there's enough evidence to bring these cases. We're not going to indict these cases. And what happened to him? He was fired. Donald Trump forced him out of office. He resigned under pressure, essentially, although Trump said he was fired."
For his replacement, Dilanian said, Trump "hasinstalled Lindsey Halligan, whois his former defense lawyer,who was a White House counselwho's never prosecuted a casein her life" — and she's now tasked with finding the pretext to prosecute Comey and all of Trump's other rivals.
"If you had told me that this is the scenario we'd be facing eight months into the Trump administration, the day after Donald Trump was elected, I would not have believed you," said Dilanian. "I would have said, wait a second, that's going too far. I mean, this is politicization of the Justice Department in a way that we could not have imagined that has never existed in the history of this country. Donald Trump's White House is calling the shots on who gets charged with crimes."