For principled critics of James Comey, the fraudulent and politicized indictment of him issued by a federal grand jury in Virginia yesterday is wrapped in layers of bitter irony. It would be entirely fair to suggest that the former FBI director brought this illegitimate prosecution upon himself.

His new predicament is only one facet of the unfolding national disaster instigated by his actions in October 2016. In those days before a presidential election, he made a fateful decision to disclose a renewed FBI probe of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and “her emails” (which ultimately proved to contain no classified information, as the Trump administration officially acknowledged many months later). It was a choice that violated Justice Department rules, legal ethics, and has permanently damaged the institutions of law he claimed to be protecting.

Yet however dismal Comey’s own conduct may have been, and however culpable he remains in the rise o, the Justice Department’s fraudulent attempt to jail him on direct orders from Trump is an historic assault on the liberty of all Americans and must be resisted as such. Although he isn’t the first victim of Trump’s drive for authoritarian power and won’t be the last, the Comey case represents a stark departure from American standards of justice and an unmistakable step toward tyranny.

Trump warned the country many times that he would abuse presidential power for “retribution” against his adversaries and critics, and – unlike his admired predecessor Richard Nixon – he made no effort to conceal what he is doing to get Comey and others. When Erik Siebert, the Trump-appointed US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia refused to prosecute Comey, the president forced him to resign.

Trump instantly replaced Siebert with Lindsey Halligan, a pliant White House attorney with no relevant qualifications for the job. She does display the abject subservience and ideological extremism required by her boss. Within days of her appointment, and just before the statute of limitations expired, Halligan delivered the two-page indictment of Comey.

In that tissue-thin bill of particulars, the Trump Justice Department charges Comey with lying to a Senate committee about a press leak from the FBI’s top echelons. Although the indictment cites no evidence whatsoever, its lynchpin appears to be an alleged contradiction between Comey’s sworn testimony that he never “authorized” such a leak, and the testimony of his former deputy Andrew McCabe that he did. But as several experts have noted, there may be no conflict between their narratives of that incident.

Except that may not even be the matter at issue. The rushed indictment is so vague that legal experts have been arguing over its actual meaning ever since its public release. Nobody seems to know precisely what Comey said that is alleged to have been false. That’s a fatal flaw in a perjury indictment, where precision is mandatory.

Among the underlying ironies is that McCabe’s 2016 leak to the Wall Street Journal involved an investigation of the Clinton Foundation, which came to nothing as such probes inevitably do. His aim was to dispel rumors, spread by conservative FBI agents seeking to sabotage the Clinton campaign, that the FBI had buried the foundation probe for political reasons.

Subsequent investigations forced McCabe to admit responsibility for that leak, which violated FBI and Justice Department rules, especially in the months before an election. Those extensive probes – by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and later by Trump’s own Russia special counsel John Durham – both found no basis to charge Comey or McCabe with any crime, while casting doubt on McCabe’s credibility. Horowitz and Durham had plenty of criticisms of the former FBI executives, but then again so do I.

Under those circumstances -- with all the glaring proof of Trump’s unlawful meddling -- the chances that Comey will be convicted, or even go to trial, seem small unless the courts abandon legality and abdicate to fascist rule. Even if the indictment is vacated, this rogue president will have inflicted severe costs not only on his “enemy,” but on the country whose Constitution he falsely swore to uphold.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).