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. Halligan most recently served as a White House adviser, and before that was one of Trump’s personal defence lawyers.
Comey’s indictment.Credit: AP
Prosecutors evaluating whether Comey lied to Congress during testimony on September 30, 2020, had until Tuesday to bring a case before the five-year statute of limitations expired.
Comey’s son-in-law, Troy Edwards, resigned from his position as a senior national security prosecutor following the news on Thursday, according to a copy of his resignation letter seen by Reuters.
He was the deputy chief of the National Security Section, a prestigious role in a US attorney’s office that covers the Pentagon and CIA headquarters, handling some of the highest-profile espionage cases.
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Edwards quit his job “to uphold my oath to the Constitution and the country”, he wrote in a one-sentence resignation letter addressed to Halligan.
Comey’s eldest daughter, Maureen Comey, was fired from her job as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan in July. She filed a lawsuit 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 the appointment of 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.
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Trump repeatedly attacked the investigation as a “witch hunt.” His second administration has sought to undermine conclusions by U.S. 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.
