Let's dispense with the sentimental part first. Plenty of us on the Left have no love for James Comey. In October 2016, eleven days before the election, he told Congress the FBI was reopening the Clinton email inquiry, a decision that helped hand Donald Trump the presidency. Nobody on the Left needs a refresher course in his judgment. That is exactly why this case matters. A principle is tested when it protects someone you'd happily never defend.
The principle is simple: the government may not hunt a person because the president wants him hunted. And Trump has not been subtle. He has made no secret of wanting his adversaries, Comey prominently among them, prosecuted, and he has talked about the Justice Department as though it were his personal law firm. Then came the first case, brought in September 2025. A court ultimately found that the prosecutor who initiated it had been improperly appointed, and the case collapsed. A prosecution that begins amid open presidential demands for punishment and ends with a judge saying the prosecutor had no legal authority is not a routine failure of case-building. It is a revealing one.
Now comes attempt three, and the method is more alarming than the target. Prosecutors skipped the grand jury and filed a criminal information. For misdemeanors, that's ordinary. For a serious felony, the Fifth Amendment says a person is entitled to a grand jury's judgment unless he waives it. Comey hasn't waived anything. The Justice Department's position, that a charging document can stand in for an indictment, isn't a creative reading. It looks like a workaround for the fact that getting an indictment has proven difficult and the clock has run out.
That difficulty is the point. The grand jury is a low bar; as the old line goes, a prosecutor could get one to indict a ham sandwich. When a Justice Department can't clear even that bar, or doesn't dare try, the sensible inference is that the case is weak, the process is compromised, or both. In the earlier Comey matter, reporting and court proceedings revealed serious questions about what jurors had actually been shown and approved. Rather than answer those questions, the government is now trying to route around the body that asks them.
The defenders of this effort say no one is above the law, and Comey, like anyone, should face a court if there's evidence. That would be persuasive if the same standard were applied evenly. It isn't. Trump's own handling of classified material produced a case that was dismissed, then abandoned after his election. Meanwhile, the department's resources are being aimed at a man whose real offense is having become one of the president's villains. Equal justice means the same rules for the powerful and the despised alike. Right now it means the rules bend when a name appears on a list.
The Left should say this without flinching and without making Comey a martyr. He doesn't need to be a hero to be entitled to a statute of limitations, a properly appointed prosecutor and a grand jury. These aren't technicalities. They are the few brakes we have on a state that would otherwise prosecute by grudge.
The cost goes beyond one man's legal bills. Every filing like this teaches federal employees that an unwelcome decision, an unwelcome witness statement or an unwelcome public stance can invite a criminal case years later. The same tool can be picked up by the next administration, and the Left should be honest that it will be tempted. The only answer is to insist now, loudly, that the tool shouldn't exist. Dismiss the case.
