Comey Indictment: Retribution or Justice?

In the matter of James Brien Comey Jr., how finds the court? I do not mean a court of law. I mean the tribunal of history.

Granted, we will be hearing from a Virginia court of law about JBC quite soon. On Thursday, Comey became the first former FBI director in history to be indicted by a grand jury for a felony. The charges? Lying to Congress and obstructing justice. (For the legal eagles among you, the statutes in question are USC 18 §1001 and USC 18 §1505.)

Call it karma, irony, or just good old-fashioned just desserts: whatever your literary preference, there is a delicious symmetry in the fact that USC 18 §1001—which prohibits making “any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement” to a government official—was the statute under which Comey tormented and bankrupted General Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor for a few weeks in 2017.

Comey later entertained a live audience with an account of how that went down. It wasn’t typical, Comey admitted, but it was early days in an administration that looked disorganized. So he just called Flynn, said he wanted to send over a couple of agents, told him he needn’t bother having legal counsel around, and the rest was filed under “entrapment.”