President Donald Trump on Friday justified the decision to have his hand-picked prosecutor indict former FBI Director James Comey as a response to the criminal charges once brought against him and to previous investigations into his 2016 presidential campaign.
As he departed the White House to watch the Ryder Cup in New York, the president told reporters he hopes there will be other sets of charges brought against his various political adversaries because they are “corrupt” and “radical left Democrats.”
He went a step further by describing Comey as “worse than a Democrat” and accused him and others as having “weaponized the Justice Department like nobody in history.”
When pressed further on whether he was concerned that future administrations could use the precedent he set by removing the career prosecutor he’d elevated to run the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and pushing her loyalist replacement to file charges against his longtime foe, he implied that the move was fair play in response to the multiple indictments he faced during his time out of power.
“They did it with me for four years. They went after me. They went after me for four years. And that doesn’t include the four great years that we had in the White House,” Trump said.
The president then launched into a litany of grievances about the 2017-2018 Department of Justice probe into alleged ties between his 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government. Both the Justice Department and a separate Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Moscow engaged in a sweeping campaign of interference to help him defeat Hillary Clinton and win his first term nine years ago.
After describing the prosecution of Comey as payback for those things, he also claimed that the charges against the veteran former prosecutor as being “about justice” as well as hurting his enemies.
“They are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it,” he said.
The charges against Comey mark the peak of a years-long feud between the president and the longtime law enforcement official, who was nominated for a ten-year term as FBI director by then-president Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate in 2013 by a vote of 93 to one.
He fell out with Trump early on in the president’s first term after refusing to deep-six an investigation into retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, who was then the president’s national security adviser. Flynn was later charged with lying to FBI agents but was pardoned by Trump before he left office after losing the 2020 election.
The relationship broke down even further after then-attorney general Jeff Sessions recused himself from supervising the FBI probe into Trump’s campaign’s potential ties to Russia, and in May 2017 Trump fired Comey after just four years out of the decade-long term he had been expected to serve.
Since then, the ex-prosecutor has become a prominent critic of the president in addition to authoring several books and teaching at the College of William and Mary law school.
The two-count indictment handed up in the Eastern District of Virginia on Thursday accuses Comey of making false statements and obstructing justice during congressional testimony in September 2020. The document notes that a grand jury didn’t concur on one of the charges prosecutors originally sought.
During questioning in the Senate at the time mentioned in the indictment, Comey defended the truthfulness of prior testimony where he said he did not authorize FBI investigations into Trump and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to be leaked to the press.
A former official who worked under Comey, Andrew McCabe, has claimed the director did in fact authorize him to leak to the press, a 2018 inspector general report found. However, the report also found McCabe had made false and misleading statements in the past.
The former FBI director said in a statement on Instagram that he was innocent and accused Trump of being a “tyrant.”
“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,” Comey said. “We will not live on our knees and you shouldn’t either.”
Josh Marcus contributed reporting
