A bipartisan trio of former White House ethics lawyers warned “no American is safe from political prosecution” after the Trump administration’s recent indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
President Donald Trump, who publicly urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political rivals without “delay” last month, has since used a federal prosecutor to embark on a retribution campaign.
Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s newly appointed interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, secured grand jury indictments against Comey and James. Comey has pleaded not guilty and his attorneys have dubbed it a “vindictive” prosecution; James has yet to make a formal plea, but called the charges against her a “weaponization of our justice system.”
Richard Painter, Norman Eisen and Virginia Canter, who served as ethics counsels for Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton respectively, asked for investigations into the indictments in a formal complaint filed with the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General Tuesday.
The trio called the pattern of revenge prosecutions an “epidemic of injustice,” saying it must be stopped.
If Halligan pursued these indictments as part of Trump’s “personal vendetta” against Comey and James, “we are facing a turning point in our democracy and some of the most egregious examples of vindictive and meritless prosecution that our nation has ever seen,” they warned.
The group also remarked on the circumstances around Halligan’s appointment. The 36-year-old boasts no prosecutorial experience, yet was tapped to replace Erik Siebert, who resigned last month after he was reportedly pressured to bring a criminal case against James, despite investigators failing to find sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.
Days after her appointment, she indicted Comey, followed by James weeks later.
“Prosecutors should never be fired for refusing to bring charges they conclude are unfounded, even if the president orders them to do so. Yet that appears to be just what President Trump has done in order to charge Mr. Comey and Ms. James,” the complaint states. The president then installed a “handpicked” replacement who agreed to prosecute his rivals.
“If the Trump administration can do this, then no American is safe from political prosecution,” they wrote.
Trump’s thoughts on “revenge” — and his targets of it — are no secret.
“Well, revenge does take time. I will say that,” he told Dr Phil last year on the campaign trail. “And sometimes revenge can be justified.”
More recently, last month, he posted on Truth Social, in what was reportedly intended to be a private message to Bondi, groaning that “nothing is being done” against James, Comey, and California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who are “all guilty as hell.”
Trump and Comey have had a rocky relationship for years, dating back to the months preceding the 2016 presidential election; the president fired the FBI director in 2017 shortly after the bureau announced it was investigating Russia’s efforts to interfere in the election. Trump’s wrath culminated last month when Comey was charged with making false statements and obstructing justice during congressional testimony he gave in September 2020. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.
After the indictment was made public, the former FBI director issued a statement: “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.”
James, meanwhile, was indicted last week on charges of bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution in connection with a loan for a property she purchased in 2020. Last year, her office brought a civil fraud case against Trump, his associates, and business empire, which concluded with a New York judge ruling in her favor. Although the defendants were ordered to pay more than $500 million, a state appeals court threw out the massive fraud penalty in August, calling it “excessive.”
Following her indictment, James said in a statement: “These charges are baseless, and the president’s own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost.”
The ethics lawyers appeared to agree, calling both indictments “flimsy,” the trio said. “Both the Comey and James matters are rife with procedural improprieties that are prejudicial to their right to a fair trial regardless of the substance of any charge.”
The trio concluded: “No American should have to go through the experience of being prosecuted under these circumstances, and the rest of us should not have to live in fear that it may also happen to us. We do not live in a dictatorship, at least not yet.”
