The decision by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to push for the indictment of former FBI director James Comey is unlikely to result in a conviction, Fox News legal expert Andrew McCarthy has said.
Comey, whom Trump fired in May 2017, was indicted by a grand jury Thursday on charges of making a false statement to Congress and obstructing its proceedings, relating to testimony he gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020 about the bureau’s investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to Russia four years earlier.
Comey himself has released a defiant video on Instagram, declaring his innocence. At the same time, the president has taunted him on Truth Social, calling him “one of the worst human beings this country has ever been exposed to,” “a dirty cop,” and “a destroyer of lives.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi and current FBI head Kash Patel also cheered the development on social media. Still, Comey’s federal prosecutor son-in-law, Troy Edwards, reacted by immediately handing in his resignation to Lindsey Halligan, the inexperienced new U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia tasked with making the case.
Appearing with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business on Friday morning, McCarthy was asked for his reaction and said flatly: “Well, I don’t think there’s a case.”
Defining himself as “as big a critic of [Russiagate] probably as there is,” he continued: “I think it was a disgrace and history will remember it that way. This indictment is not about that, and it seems to be premised on something that’s not true, which is that [ex-FBI deputy director Andrew] McCabe said that Comey authorized him to leak to The Wall Street Journal.
“If you look closely at what McCabe said, what McCabe said was that he directed a leak to The Wall Street Journal and told Comey about it after the fact. So it’s true that Comey never authorized it in the sense of OK-ing it before it happened. So I don’t see how they can make that case.”
Bartiromo pushed back by saying, “What about the leaking in general? I mean, what about leaking a story that they may have known was a lie to the media? Because if you’re the director of the FBI, you need the evidence…”
She continued: “You know, for years, congressmen and lawmakers were trying to understand – Devin Nunes, John Ratcliffe – trying to understand what’s the origins of this investigation? So what was the origins of Russia collusion with Trump? And so they never really had any evidence of it. But they leaked it to the press.”
“Yeah, but that’s not what this case is about,” McCarthy replied.
“I totally agree with you,” he continued. “But that’s not what this case is about. What this case is about is Comey is accused of lying because [of] what Ted Cruz said… And what Cruz said, and I think this was just a garble on his part, was Comey authorized McCabe to orchestrate the leak.
“Now, McCabe said that he directed the leak, and he told Comey about it afterwards. Now they have a dispute about what exactly McCabe told Comey afterwards, and whether Comey was approving or disapproving of it. But the charge is that Comey authorized the leak. He didn’t authorize the leak.”
McCarthy’s comments follow the same network’s Howard Kurtz offering a damning verdict to anchor Gillian Turner on Thursday when he said: “Let’s not mince words here… this was completely and totally orchestrated by President Trump. He says he’s leaving it to Justice but, you know, he very much out in the open…
“Remember he fired his own appointee as U.S. attorney in that part of Virginia [Erik Siebert] because he didn’t think there was enough evidence to bring this case, brought in a White House aide [Halligan], his former defense lawyer, whose job was to get this done and apparently that has worked.
“I think we’ve become inured to this but, in previous administrations, any hint of contact with a criminal case would be a scandal on its own and so President Trump, by the way he pulled the strings, has gotten his way with this initial indictment.”
