President Donald Trump has lashed out at former FBI director James Comey a day after he was indicted by a grand jury on charges of making a false statement to Congress and obstructing its proceedings.
The president, who will attend the Ryder Cup later today, said that he believes Comey is already “off to a good start” as his case will be heard by a “Crooked Joe Biden appointed Judge,” a reference to U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, who was randomly assigned the job on Thursday evening.
“Whether you like Corrupt James Comey or not, and I can’t imagine too many people liking him, HE LIED! It is not a complex lie, it’s a very simple, but IMPORTANT one,” the president wrote on Truth Social on Friday morning of the man he fired in May 2017.
“There is no way he can explain his way out of it. He is a Dirty Cop, and always has been, but he was just assigned a Crooked Joe Biden appointed Judge, so he’s off to a very good start. Nevertheless, words are words, and he wasn’t hedging or in dispute. He was very positive, there was no doubt in his mind about what he said, or meant by saying it.
“He left himself ZERO margin of error on a big and important answer to a question. He just got unexpectedly caught. James ‘Dirty Cop’ Comey was a destroyer of lives. He knew exactly what he was saying, and that it was a very serious and far reaching lie for which a very big price must be paid!”
In a follow-up post, Trump added in all-caps: “JAMES COMEY IS A DIRTY COP. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Comey, 64, is a long-standing enemy of the president, who fumed during his first term over the official’s alleged mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email affair during the 2016 presidential election and the “Crossfire Hurricane” probe examining, ultimately inconclusively, whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian operatives to win the White House.
The former FBI director appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 30 2020, to discuss the latter. Under the statute of limitations, the deadline to take issue with his remarks that day falls on Tuesday, the fifth anniversary of his appearance, hence the administration’s rush to act.
Comey was duly indicted by a jury of more than a dozen jurors on Thursday on the two charges related to his testimony. However, they opted not to indict him on a third count of lying to Congress, an unusual twist given that grand juries seldom dismiss prosecutors’ charges.
Judge Nachmanoff sits in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, and, according to Politico, has had a number of previous run-ins with Trumpworld, notably presiding over the 2019 arraignment of two Rudy Giuliani associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, when they were charged with campaign finance violations and he was a federal magistrate. He released the duo on a $1 million bond.
More recently, the justice permitted the CIA to fire a doctor who had been targeted by Trump’s allies over her role in advocating for mandatory Covid-19 vaccines in the military.
Nachmanoff was confirmed in 2021 in a tight 52-46 Senate vote that saw him pick up the support of just three Republicans: Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.
Responding to Thursday’sdevelopment in a defiant video posted to Instagram, Comey said of his indictment: “My family and I have known for years that there are costs for standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either.
“I’m not afraid, and I hope you aren’t either. My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I’m innocent. So let’s have a trial and keep the faith.”
His son-in-law Troy Edwards reacted to the news by resigning his role as a federal prosecutor, addressing a one-sentence letter to Lindsey Halligan, the new U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who last week replaced the much more experienced Erik Siebert in the role after a career in Florida home insurance litigation.
Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and current FBI head Kash Patel, by contrast, all cheered the Comey indictment on social media, with the president going so far as to call him “one of the worst human beings this country has ever been exposed to.”
