U.S. President Donald Trump attends the Ryder Cup golf tournament in Farmingdale, N.Y., on Friday. He has ramped up attacks on his perceived enemies in recent weeks.Mandel Ngan/The Associated Press
U.S. President Donald Trump says more people will be charged criminally after the indictment of former FBI director James Comey, signalling an escalation of his campaign of revenge against his perceived enemies.
Addressing mounting criticism that he is suborning the country’s justice system to meet his political demands, Mr. Trump doubled down on Friday.
“It’s not a list, but I think there’ll be others. I mean, they’re corrupt,” he told reporters outside the White House when asked whom he wanted to see charged next. “I hope there are others, because you can’t let this happen to a country.”
In posts on Truth Social, Mr. Trump called Mr. Comey a “DIRTY COP” who must pay a “very big price.”
Mr. Comey, who was indicted Thursday on two federal criminal charges for allegedly lying to Congress, is expected to be arraigned Oct. 9 in Alexandria, Va. His case was assigned at random to Judge Michael Nachmanoff, an appointee of former president Joe Biden.
In an Instagram video, Mr. Comey declared “I’m innocent” and said he was confident of being exonerated in court: “Let’s have a trial.”
“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way,” he said. “We will not live on our knees and you shouldn’t, either.”
The prosecution of Mr. Comey follows years of the President calling for him to face criminal sanction. Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey as FBI director in 2017 over the agency’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The charges are the latest in a string of threats and actions Mr. Trump and his administration have taken against political opponents, critics and other people the President disagrees with, including New York Attorney-General Letitia James, California Senator Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, former national security adviser John Bolton, former vice-president Kamala Harris, and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
Ty Cobb, who was on the White House legal team during the Russian interference investigation, said he expects Mr. Trump to keep using government power to go after the “long list of people he hates” so long as he can find loyalists to do his bidding.
The Associated Press
“We’re no longer the United States of America where, for 250 years, we had an independent justice system,” Mr. Cobb, who is also a former federal prosecutor, said in an interview. “Now, the justice system is his personal law firm, directed to wreak vengeance on anyone he doesn’t like.”
He contended that the current moment could either mark a tipping point that leads to the “total elimination of the rule of law” or galvanize a public backlash that forces Mr. Trump to back down.
“This is 180 degrees from what America has always been and was intended to be. This is authoritarianism and tyranny in full bloom,” Mr. Cobb said.
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Dan Goldman, a Democratic member of Congress from New York and former prosecutor, said on social media that the charges against Mr. Comey were “a joke” that would not survive the test of a courtroom. But he warned that the repercussions were greater than a single case.
“The fundamental underpinning of democracy, which we spread around the world, is an apolitical, independent criminal justice system,” he wrote on X.
Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican member of Congress, tweeted that his own party might come to regret setting such a prosecutorial precedent the next time it is out of the White House. “GOP needs to remember they only have power 3 more years. That goes fast.”
The indictment in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Mr. Comey lives in a suburb of Washington, accuses him of making a “fraudulent” statement at a Sept. 30, 2020 congressional hearing. Under questioning from Republican Senator Ted Cruz that day, Mr. Comey denied authorizing a 2016 media leak by his then-deputy at the FBI, Andrew McCabe, concerning an investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Comey is sworn in prior to testifying before a 2017 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.JONATHAN ERNST/Reuters
The indictment did not indicate what evidence prosecutors have that Mr. Comey was not telling the truth. A previous internal investigation by the Department of Justice found his version of events credible and said that Mr. McCabe had misled him about the leak.
Erik Siebert, whom the President had appointed as the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia in January, resigned under pressure from Mr. Trump last week, after reportedly deciding not to indict Mr. Comey. The President replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide and former member of his personal legal team who has never previously prosecuted a case.
Mr. Trump also publicly complained to Attorney-General Pam Bondi on Truth Social that there had been no “action” on Mr. Comey, Mr. Schiff or Ms. James from prosecutors. “They’re all guilty as hell,” he wrote. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Within days of being sworn in, Ms. Halligan presented the indictment against Mr. Comey.
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After his 2017 firing, Mr. Comey recounted in a book, in congressional testimony and in interviews that Mr. Trump had indicated Mr. Comey’s job depended on his loyalty to the President and publicly exonerating him in the Russia investigation.
Mr. Trump responded that Mr. Comey’s disclosure of their conversations constituted a crime. “The big questions in Comey’s badly reviewed book aren’t answered like, how come he gave up Classified Information (jail), why did he lie to Congress (jail),” he tweeted in April, 2018.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail two days later, Mr. Comey warned that people shouldn’t shrug off such comments as mere bluster.
“There’s a danger in that shrug, because if everyone shrugs like that – ‘Oh, the President just called for the jailing of a private citizen’ – then we’ve normalized that behaviour,” he said. “We all have to talk about it and not become numb to it.”