Why Not?

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of Boiling Frogs. You can read Nick's full newsletter by becoming a member here.

I think he posted it deliberately. Bondi has reportedly “expressed reservations” to Trump about charging Comey for allegedly lying to Congress, apparently believing that there’s not enough evidence to convict him of anything; nothing would be Trumpier than the president choosing to make a spectacle of her reluctance, hoping to intimidate her into moving forward by training MAGA’s anger on her.

Presumably the post was deleted because some lawyer—possibly Bondi herself—explained to him that (a) browbeating her publicly about Comey means she’ll be discredited whether she brings charges or not and (b) confessing to the world that the prosecution is politically motivated can only help the defendant get off. In broadcasting his corrupt motives, Andrew McCarthy writes, the president has all but assured that his enemies won’t be successfully tried.

So Trump took it down, stupidly trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube. (Though he eventually re-posted it.)*

As much as he’d like to send Comey to the Big House, though, that’s not his goal here any more than it’s his goal in the John Bolton case. He hinted as much to reporters a few days ago. “If they’re not guilty, that’s fine,” Trump said of Comey, James, and Schiff. “If they are guilty or if they should be judged, they should be charged. And we have to do it now.” 

The point isn’t to see justice done for crimes they may have committed, the point is to put them through the same wringer of legal process that he went through in 2023 and 2024. The White House, through its official spokesperson, isn’t even pretending otherwise. An eye for an eye, as Trump’s favorite Bible verse says. Retribution, as he’s said himself many times in the past two years.

For the president, there’s really no downside in frivolously charging James Comey.

News broke yesterday that an indictment is expected before Tuesday, when the five-year statute of limitations on Comey supposedly perjuring himself during congressional testimony in 2020 will expire. Trump might be the only person in the federal government who thinks it’s a good idea.

As noted, Bondi is supposedly reluctant. So was Erik Siebert, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, where the case is likely to be brought. Siebert resigned last week before Trump could fire him for declining to prosecute Comey or Letitia James. The new acting U.S. attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was reportedly greeted by a memo from her staff explaining why charges against Comey aren’t warranted. The top deputy in the office under Halligan is said to share that opinion.

Normally a debate over whether to bring a difficult case against a suspect would focus on whether prosecutors believe, in good faith, that they can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In Comey’s case, the evidence is so weak that the lawyers in Halligan’s office doubt there’s even probable cause to believe that a crime was committed—that is, that an indictment should issue under the circumstances.

But Halligan, a former Trump defense attorney who’s never prosecuted a case and who used to practice insurance law, is apparently planning to convene a grand jury anyway. The precise way that this prosecution will end is anyone’s guess but that it’ll end with James Comey walking free is a near certainty, which is normally all a U.S. attorney should need to know to justify not seeking charges. Even Fox News isn’t getting viewers’ hopes up.

Still, it’ll be good for the president if Halligan at least makes the attempt, no?

The first thing it will do for him is enlist the Justice Department, congressional Republicans, and the broader right as accomplices in the postliberal project to weaponize law enforcement against political enemies. It’s one thing to charge a nemesis when there really is reason to believe he committed a crime—which may or may not be true in Bolton’s case—but quite another to do so when your own prosecutors are saying, “There’s nothing here.”

Every right-winger in America will be asked next week to decide how comfortable they are with dragging someone into court when the president is openly advertising the process as a form of naked political retribution. What will Sen. Ted Cruz, the once and future champion of constitutional conservatism, say about the propriety of it now that a right-wing bête noire like Comey, not a random late-night host, is in Trump’s crosshairs?

We might see a few resignations at the DOJ and hear a bit of grumbling in Republican quarters of Congress and the media, but I expect most of the right will suck it up on proceeding against Comey. And if so, that’s a win for Trump: He’ll have the green light from his prosecutors and from his base to continue using criminal law to satisfy his grudges.

And have no doubt: He will.

Democrats already weaponized law enforcement against their political enemies by prosecuting Trump, MAGA’s many whataboutists will say at this point. No, Democrats didn’t—not like this, at least—but that’s another way in which prosecuting Comey is useful to Trump. Insisting that he’s only doing to the left what the left did to him will encourage the false, self-serving belief that the criminal cases brought against him after his first term were similarly frivolous.

To repeat: Per the reporting, prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia don’t believe there’s enough evidence against Comey to even justify an indictment. Trump was indicted in four separate jurisdictions for dozens of crimes. Of those four indictments, one was a slam dunk and two others sought to punish him for offenses related to an honest-to-God coup plot. The only truly dubious case filed against him was the one in Manhattan brought by Alvin Bragg.

And while I’d certainly call that one trivial, I wouldn’t call it frivolous. By definition, frivolous prosecutions don’t end with guilty verdicts on dozens of felony charges, right?

One of the ways that the right copes with supporting a criminal is by assuring itself that the president is no more or less of one than his opponents. From that perspective, formally accusing Comey of a crime is a no-lose proposition: Even if he beats the rap, Republicans will resort to some claptrap about “woke” juries or “deep state” judges supposedly being more willing to convict Trump than his enemies. The accusation of criminality is the important thing for whataboutist purposes.

Charging Comey does one more thing for Trump. It warns his adversaries that he’s getting more aggressive in his authoritarianism and therefore that the price of challenging him is rising.

I laughed on Tuesday when he blew up days of right-wing spin about Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension. Republicans had been insisting that Disney yanked Kimmel for business reasons, not because the president or the Federal Communications Commission had leaned on the company. Then the show was reinstated, causing Trump to announce that he’ll … need to lean harder on Disney-owned ABC from now on. Kimmel “is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this,” he warned.

Some of his critics thought he made a mistake by undermining the defense that the right had contrived for him, but not me. The jawboning is the point: Trump wanted Americans to know that his administration behaved improperly toward Disney for the same reason that he wants them to know he’s willing to charge James Comey whether or not the evidence is solid. Let all who would defy the king understand that, if you cross him, no norm will stop him from trying to make your life hell. 

When you look at it that way, the shadier Comey’s prosecution seems, the better it is for Trump. Dumping Siebert and replacing him with an unqualified crony like Halligan shows that the president can and will steamroll ethical restraints on abuses of power by promoting people who are willing to abet his retribution campaign. If you’ve been telling yourself that America remains enough of a first-world country that the president can’t throw you in jail for making him angry, here he comes to say: I’m going to try.

“His unabashed demand that Bondi prosecute his adversaries has put her in a bind and alarmed some current and former Justice Department officials who say it threatens the institution’s credibility in ways that will be difficult to repair,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. But that’s the point. You’re not supposed to trust the DOJ under Trump. You’re supposed to fear it, and him.

There are a few ways that the Comey case could theoretically play out.

The best way would be if Congress impeached Trump for it and removed him from office. “Is it an impeachable offense to call for the government’s publicly funded law enforcement apparatus to be used for the president’s personal vengeance?” Andrew McCarthy asked on Monday, before answering his own question: “Of course it is.” But he knows, and I know, and you know, that impeachment is a dead letter in modern American politics, especially when that power is in the hands of Republicans. Mike Johnson and his traitorous conference have pledged their loyalty to a Trumpist dictatorship, not to the Constitution.

The next best way this could end is with a public backlash over Trump’s corruption that causes him to relent, but that’s about as likely as an impeachment. Americans aren’t going to get indignant on behalf of James Comey, a man despised by the left for how he handled Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate scandal in 2016 and despised by the right for pursuing the Russiagate probe against Trump a year later. And even if Comey had no such baggage, Americans don’t “do” civic outrage anymore. They’ll get mad at the president if the price of groceries rises or, perhaps, if he starts messing with their TV. Short of that, he can do whatever.

The best outcome after that would be Bondi, Halligan, and other relevant prosecutors refusing to file charges against Comey and daring Trump to replace them with lawyers who will. That might get him to back off—but I wouldn’t count on it. There are plenty of Renfields in the Bill Pulte or “Eagle Ed” Martin mold waiting on the Republican bench whom he might look to install as acting U.S. attorney, knowing that that person will do whatever he says. The world is full of Jeffrey Clarks, it turns out, and the president’s movement has done a crack job of identifying them over the last four years. Trump can and will find someone who’ll seek the indictment if he’s determined to do so.

So maybe we’re left with (grand) jury nullification.

The New York Times noticed something curious a few weeks ago: More than once recently, federal grand juries in Washington, D.C., have refused to issue indictments in cases brought by the Justice Department. That’s rare. Like, really, really rare, enough so that a coincidence is unlikely. Either Trump’s DOJ is serially overcharging defendants to impress the boss with how “tough” they are (certainly possible) or Washingtonians are tacitly protesting the military’s intrusion into their city by refusing to issue indictments in certain cases.

The case against James Comey could go the same route. As news spreads that the president’s own lawyers don’t support charging him, the odds rise that grand jurors will hear about it, view the evidence skeptically, and decline to indict. I’d bet my last doughnut that that’s what most of the Justice Department is hoping for: The only way to get Comey off the hook legally and their own department off the hook politically with the president is to do what Trump demands by seeking charges and quietly hoping that a Virginia grand jury returns with a thumbs down.

But it’s not ideal. For one thing, it would be another case during the Trump era of cowardly Republicans leaving it to someone else to check the president instead of doing it themselves. The proper course for Pam Bondi now that he’s asked her to behave unethically is to resign, not to dump this mess into the laps of a grand jury—especially since that grand jury might very well end up indicting Comey despite the lack of evidence. You know the quote about ham sandwiches as well as I do.

A “no bill” in the Comey case also might not deter Trump from future frivolous prosecutions. He can and will blame Democrats on the grand jury for refusing to indict and vow to charge Adam Schiff and Letitia James in redder jurisdictions. And instead of feeling embarrassed by seeing Comey go free, he might take encouragement from it: What’s wrong with trying to charge your enemies, the president might ask, if the justice system has procedural safeguards in place to weed out weak cases? Seek indictments against everyone! Let America’s grand juries decide which Trump enemies deserve to face trial and which don’t.

The process is the punishment—for James Comey, for George Soros, and for anyone else who makes trouble for this fascist movement. Grand juries can truncate that process significantly but they can’t stop the Justice Department from initiating it. Only ethical Republicans with backbones can do that. Anyone seen any?

Editor’s Note, September 27, 2025: This newsletter has been updated to note that President Donald Trump reposted his Truth Social message to Attorney General Pam Bondi.