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“It’s not a list. But I think there’ll be others,” Mr Trump said on Friday, US time, as he left the White House to go and watch some Ryder Cup golf. “I mean they’re corrupt. They were corrupt, radical left Democrats. “They weaponised the Justice Department like nobody in history. What they’ve done is terrible. And so I hope, frankly I hope there are others. Because you can’t let this happen to your country.” Mr Comey, whom Mr Trump fired during his first term in the White House, has become a persistent subject of the President’s ire because of his frequent public criticism. Mr Trump has been calling for law enforcement to go after him for years. The charges against Mr Comey, announced this week after Mr Trump replaced the top prosecutor in the relevant jurisdiction, who had refused to move forward with the case, relate to his testimony before Congress in September of 2020. The government alleges Mr Comey lied to Congress when he claimed not to have authorised staff at the FBI to leak to reporters. It says he actually authorised at least one person to leak information about investigations into the Democrats’ 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, whose use of a private email server while she was secretary of state had blown up into a significant political scandal. A grand jury, tasked with determining whether there was probable cause for the accusations against Mr Comey, voted to proceed with the case this week. According to court documents, 14 of the 23 grand jury members voted in the affirmative, barely over the 12-vote threshold required. When it comes to trial, prosecutors will need to convince an entire jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr Comey is guilty. And that may prove quite challenging. The case appears to boil down to a he-said, he-said, with Mr Comey’s account of what happened behind the scenes at the FBI pitted against the claims of former deputy director Andrew McCabe. An inspector-general’s report, which examined the two men’s accounts years ago, actually found Mr McCabe’s version of events to be less credible than Mr Comey’s, and in 2019 Mr Trump’s Justice Department tried to charge Mr McCabe for lying to investigators. The case was eventually dropped when a grand jury rejected it. Another obstacle, for prosecutors, will be to convince both the jury and a judge overseeing the case that it’s not politically motivated. A week ago Erik Siebert, who was the acting US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, left the job after Mr Trump declared “I want him out”. That came after Mr Siebert concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge Mr Comey. He’d also declined to prosecute New York’s Attorney-General Letitia James, whom Mr Trump has accused of mortgage fraud. Ms James, who suggested to New York voters, while she was campaigning for her current job, that she would go after Mr Trump, brought civil fraud charges against him last year. The President has also publicly pushed for criminal charges to be brought against Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who led one of the impeachment trials against him during his first term; former CIA director John Brennan, who’s been a vocal critic of Mr Trump; John Bolton, who is one of Mr Trump’s own former national security advisers; and one of the governors of the Federal Reserve, Biden appointee Lisa Cook. Back to the Comey case. Mr Siebert was replaced as the top prosecutor in eastern Virginia by Lindsey Halligan, one of Mr Trump’s White House aides, who has a background in insurance law, and no experience as a prosecutor. Multiple US media outlets have reported that Ms Halligan was presented an assessment, by the prosecutors in her new office, that the case against Mr Comey was too weak to pursue. Nevertheless, she decided to go ahead with it. Mr Trump celebrated the indictment after it was announced, writing “JUSTICE IN AMERICA” in all-caps on social media. “He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation,” said the President. Mr Comey issued a video statement of his own, saying he was “not afraid”. “My family and I have known for years 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 public statements, from Mr Trump, will complicate his appointee’s efforts to secure a conviction of Mr Comey. “All of these public statements from the {resident could actually help James Comey get this thrown out by a judge,” ABC News host George Stephanopoulos put to the network’s chief legal analyst, Dan Abrams, today. “Correct,” said Mr Abrams. “I mean look, that’s going to be the first question. Is this case even going to make it to trial? Is a judge going to throw out the case? “And that is certainly going to be part of the defence’s argument, is citing each and every one of the social media posts by the President demanding this prosecution.” Other legal experts are echoing that warning. “The President’s social media posts and statements are a major problem for the prosecution, both legally and practically,” law professor Jeffrey Bellin, from Vanderbilt University, told the British public broadcaster, the BBC. “From the outside, it looks like this prosecution was brought at the direct request of the President, over the objections of the professional prosecutors, against a political opponent. “And this all happened in public view.”
