James Comey built a second career telling Americans that no one is above the law. The Justice Department has now accused him of having lived by a different rule.
The criminal information unsealed in Washington charges the former FBI director with unlawfully communicating national defense information and conspiring to disclose it. The alleged acts are from October 2016. Prosecutors say he directed others to put that information in a reporter's hands. October 2016 was not a quiet month at the Bureau. It was the month Comey had already made the FBI a protagonist in a presidential election — the late letter on Clinton's emails, the still-hidden investigation of the Trump campaign, a headquarters that leaked like a screened porch. Into that month, the government now alleges, the director himself aimed national defense information at the press.
If the allegation is true, forget the cable-panel vocabulary of norms and guardrails. A director who moves national defense information toward a reporter is not exercising oversight. He is deciding that a story matters more than the secrecy rules he is paid to enforce. People beneath him have been fired, prosecuted, and ruined for less. He got the book deal.
That grievance is legitimate. It is not a verdict.
Look at the vehicle. This is an information, not an indictment. Prosecutors filed it while the inquiry is still open, for one stated reason: to preserve the statute of limitations before it runs out. They then agreed to stop, for thirty days, trying to obtain the indictment a felony case ordinarily requires. Comey's lawyers argue the government cannot proceed this way, and on the ordinary reading of federal criminal procedure they have a point. An information is what you file when a defendant waives the grand jury, or when you are racing a clock. His lawyers also say two earlier investigations ended without charges. Nobody has ruled on the motion to dismiss. Until someone does, this prosecution exists mostly as a date on a calendar.
That is not how you proceed against a man you are prepared to convict. It is how an institution proceeds when it wants the appearance of action and a door out the back. A dismissal on timing would be the best outcome Comey could buy. He would call it vindication. The press would call it closure. The underlying question — did the FBI director use national defense information as a political instrument in the last weeks of a campaign? — would go untried, which is the only kind of untried Washington ever seems to arrange for its own.
Conservatives should not clap for that. The last decade produced a real education in two-tiered justice: process crimes prosecuted with religious zeal when the defendant was inconvenient, and leadership leaks treated as a personnel matter when the leaker had a title. The answer is not a mirror-image stunt. A limitations placeholder followed by a voluntary pause is a stunt. If this is payback in a statutory costume, it will fail, and it should. Retaliation is not the rule of law. It is the other team's rationalization, borrowed.
The standard is not complicated, and it does not require trusting Comey or trusting the prosecutors who have already flinched. Take the evidence to a grand jury. Indict or decline. Try whatever survives in open court, where national defense information has to be more than an ominous phrase and where the defense can test every inference. Then live with the verdict.
What the public should refuse is the third ending. Another closed file. Another speech about the system working. Another former director explaining that accountability is for other people. October 2016 was when the FBI decided it could shape an election and call it duty. Either the government can prove that duty included steering national defense information to a reporter, under the same procedures it demands of every other American, or it should say out loud that it cannot. There is no honorable version of almost.
