Donald Trump has sparred with James Comey for years. But on Thursday night, their confrontation culminated in a federal indictment of the former FBI director that marks a watershed for the rule of law in America.
In recent months, the Trump administration has unleashed a series of attacks against its perceived foes. But Comey’s indictment, which comes days after the US president demanded his prosecution on social media, ruptures a decades-old tradition of curbing presidential influence on law enforcement.
Critics say the charges that Comey lied to Congress and obstructed a Senate proceeding risk turning the Department of Justice into a White House weapon.
“There’s been a pattern since day one of this administration of using government power to reward and excuse the president’s friends and to harass and punish the president’s critics,” said Gregg Nunziata, a conservative lawyer and executive director at the Society for the Rule of Law.
Comey’s indictment marked “a really dramatic escalation . . . also in corrupting the justice department, its values, and the men and women that hold on to those values”, he added.
As head of the executive branch, Trump oversees the DoJ and can set its policy priorities. But under norms established after Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal in the 1970s to protect the department’s independence, presidents refrain from demanding prosecutions.
The department’s leadership and US attorneys are appointed by the president and confirmed by Congress. They are expected to make independent prosecutorial decisions based on the evidence.
Critics fear Comey’s indictment opens the floodgates to politically driven cases — a goal that Trump appeared to endorse on Friday, when he warned that while there was no list of who would be targeted next, “there will be others”.
“This is a pivotal moment in American history,” said Anthony Coley, a former DoJ official under ex-president Joe Biden. “There are still guardrails — the judge could dismiss [Comey’s indictment] on selective prosecution grounds, and a jury could acquit. But in many ways the process itself is the punishment. The message from Trump is unmistakable: cross him, and he’ll come for you.”
The DoJ has already launched mortgage fraud investigations involving Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor Trump is seeking to fire, and Letitia James, the New York attorney-general who last year brought a civil fraud case against Trump. Both women deny wrongdoing.
The DoJ is also said to be investigating Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California. Trump last week named Schiff, alongside James and Comey, in a social media post in which he urged US attorney-general Pam Bondi to target them. “Nothing is being done . . . JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he wrote.
Other potential targets remain unclear. But Trump has pledged to seek retribution against a swath of individuals, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, the Republican lawmaker who helped lead congressional efforts to investigate the attack at the US Capitol on January 6 2021.
Trump on Thursday also named billionaire Democratic donors George Soros and Reid Hoffman as members of the “radical left” who could be investigated.
Political efforts to influence law enforcement are not new in American history. A report by the Office of Inspector General found “significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor” in former president George W Bush’s “fundamentally flawed” removal of nine US attorneys in 2006.
Bill Clinton had a fraught relationship with former US attorney-general Janet Reno, who sought to keep the president at arm’s length and allowed independent counsel Kenneth Starr to broaden his inquiry into the president to include his liaison with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
But Trump’s pressure on law enforcement is on a different scale, according to some law experts.
“It’s a brand new frontier for a US president to apparently order the indictment of a citizen, itself extraordinary, and here despite career prosecutors [reportedly] saying there’s insufficient evidence to bring charges,” said Ryan Goodman, professor at the New York University School of Law. “I know of no parallel in modern American history.”
The Trump administration is also mobilising the broader government apparatus to target opponents. Allegations of mortgage misconduct from the Federal Housing Finance Agency have underpinned federal probes, such as the ones against Cook and James.
Democrats were outraged by Comey’s indictment, which came after the US attorney in charge of the investigation resigned. “The Department of Justice has become a political tool of a vengeful President,” Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, said in a scathing statement, adding: “Is there one Republican left in Washington who gives a damn?”
Republicans have largely backed the prosecution, which focuses on Comey’s 2020 testimony to a Senate committee about leaks from an FBI investigation. “Fundamentally, this is about accountability, and I think that’s what a lot of people have been asking for. OK?” Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican member of Congress, told Fox Business on Friday.
Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina, wrote on X: “If the FBI director can lie to a court and weaponise politics to destroy our president, the rule of law has died.”
Trump’s DoJ describes Comey’s indictment as a necessary step to rid law enforcement of political bias they believe was demonstrated by criminal cases filed against Trump in the months leading up to the 2024 general election.
During the Biden administration, the DoJ obtained two indictments against Trump. The cases were overseen by a special counsel, an external prosecutor who is appointed to handle politically sensitive matters.
FBI director Kash Patel, who answers to Bondi, on Friday rejected accusations of political interference. “The wildly false accusations attacking this FBI for the politicisation of law enforcement comes from the same bankrupt media that sold the world on Russia Gate — it’s hypocrisy on steroids,” he wrote in a post on X.
The White House and the DoJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Comey, who headed the FBI when it investigated contacts between Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government, on Friday said he was innocent and welcomed a trial.
Comey’s indictment has been roundly criticised by Democratic lawmakers, even though he elicits little sympathy on the left. A longtime Republican who was appointed to prominent positions by both George W Bush and Barack Obama, he is blamed by many Democrats for helping Trump win the White House in 2016 because he publicly reopened an inquiry into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, just before the November election.
But critics from across the ideological spectrum agree that the indictment has set a precedent that is bound to outlast Trump’s days in the White House.
“I’m afraid it will be a generational challenge [to reverse],” Nunziata said. “Norms and institutions are built and strengthened over decades, but they can be destroyed overnight”.
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