Donald Trump said on Friday that he expected more people whom he considers his political enemies to face criminal charges, a day after the justice department indicted former FBI director James Comey and faced a torrent of criticism for enacting the president’s campaign of retribution.
“It’s not a list, but I think there’ll be others,” Trump said as he departed the White House to travel to the Ryder Cup golf tournament. “I mean, they’re corrupt. They were corrupt radical left Democrats.”
Trump’s blunt remarks underscored the perilous moment for his political adversaries, given that the justice department pressed ahead with criminal charges against Comey, even though it was widely seen – inside and outside the administration – to be a weak case.
The indictment against Comey, filed in federal district court on Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, alleged that he misled lawmakers in September 2020 when he stood by his previous testimony to Congress claiming he had never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak to reporters.
Prosecutors alleged that statement was not true and that Comey had authorized his friend and Columbia law school professor Dan Richman to leak to reporters about an investigation into Hilary Clinton, when Richman worked for a short time as a special government employee at the FBI.
But the underlying evidence against Comey, which remains unclear from the two-page indictment, was considered to be insufficient for a conviction. The issues were laid out in a memo and Erik Siebert, the then interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, declined to bring charges.
Trump fired Siebert within days and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, most recently a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience. Halligan was briefed on the problems with the case but pressed forward with charges anyway, presenting the case herself to the grand jury.
The grand jury returned an indictment on two counts but declined to approve a third. Even then, only 14 out of 23 grand jurors voted to bring the false statement charge, barely more than the 12-person threshold, court documents show.
The fraught nature of the Comey indictment raised fresh fears that Trump’s political appointees at justice department headquarters in Washington and at its field offices elsewhere will feel emboldened to pursue criminal cases against the president’s other adversaries.
Among other people, Trump has fixated in recent weeks on criminal investigations against the New York attorney general Letitia James and Democratic senator Adam Schiff over mortgage fraud allegations. James brought a civil fraud case against Trump last year and Schiff led the first impeachment trial.
Last weekend, before Comey’s indictment, Trump called on his attorney general Pam Bondi to pursue Comey, James and Schiff. “They impeached me twice and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!” Trump posted on Truth Social.
The administration also launched a criminal investigation into former CIA director John Brennan, who Trump despises for his role in the US intelligence community’s assessment in 2016 about Russian malign influence operations aimed at helping the Trump campaign.
Last month, the FBI also searched the home and office of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic, over allegations he mishandled classified documents. The FBI recovered documents with classification markings but Bolton’s lawyer claimed they had been declassified.
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