On September 25, a federal grand jury in Virginia indicted former FBI Director James Comey on two felony counts, making him the first of Donald Trump's perceived enemies to face criminal charges. For about two months, the United States government ran an active prosecution against a man the president had named, publicly and by name, as someone who needed to be charged. Then, on November 24, a federal judge threw the case out entirely.
The charges are gone. The machinery that produced them is still sitting there, warmed up. That machinery deserves more attention than the indictment ever did.
Start with the sequence, because the sequence is the story. Career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia spent months investigating whether Comey lied to the Senate in 2020 when he denied authorizing anyone at the FBI to leak to the media. According to ABC News, they concluded they could not establish probable cause, a bar far below what a conviction requires, and they put that conclusion in a detailed memo recommending against charges. Their boss, interim U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert, had reportedly reached a similar view. On September 19, he was forced out.
The next day, Trump posted a message on Truth Social addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi as "Pam." He named Comey, Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, declared them "all guilty as hell," and wrote, "We can't delay any longer... JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!" NBC News later reported, citing an administration official, that Trump had meant the message to be private and was surprised to learn he had posted it publicly. He left it up.
Two days after Siebert's exit, Trump installed Lindsey Halligan, his former personal defense attorney, as interim U.S. attorney. Halligan had practiced insurance law before joining Trump's legal team in 2022 and had never prosecuted a federal case. Three days after taking the job, and five days before the five-year statute of limitations on Comey's testimony expired, she secured an indictment. Her signature was the one on it. Even then, the grand jury declined to approve one of the three proposed charges, a detail that rarely happens, since grand juries indict in the overwhelming majority of cases prosecutors bring them.
The weakness of the underlying case mattered too, because it explains why so many people had to be swapped out to bring it. The charge hinged on the claim that Comey lied when he told the Senate he had not authorized a leak. The only serious evidence against his account traces back to his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, whose version of events the Justice Department's own inspector general had already examined and rejected. In a 2018 report, the OIG concluded that "the overwhelming weight of the circumstantial evidence supports Comey's recollection" and stated flatly of McCabe's claim, "we do not credit it." Prosecutors would have had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Comey lied about something their own department's watchdog said he probably told the truth about.
The case ended without any of that ever being tested. Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled that Halligan's appointment violated the federal statute governing U.S. attorney vacancies and the Constitution's Appointments Clause, because Siebert had already exhausted the legal limit on interim service. "All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan's defective appointment, including securing and signing Mr. Comey's indictment, were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside," Currie wrote. She also flagged something stranger: the final minutes of the grand jury session that indicted Comey appear to have gone untranscribed, with no court reporter in the room. Comey's attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, says the expired statute of limitations means no second indictment is possible. The Justice Department says it will appeal, and the White House says this "will not be the final word."
The pattern around the Comey case says as much as the case itself. Letitia James was indicted, saw her case tossed on the same grounds, and then watched two separate grand juries, one in Norfolk and one in Alexandria, refuse to indict her again in December. John Bolton was indicted in Maryland in October on classified documents charges, though that case came through a different U.S. attorney's office with a search warrant affidavit behind it, and a judge had raised concerns about Bolton's handling of classified material years earlier. Bolton, for his part, calls it retribution. The day after Comey's indictment, Trump told reporters, "I think there will be others."
Since Watergate, presidents of both parties treated the distance between the White House and individual prosecutions as load-bearing. Nixon kept an enemies list, and it was a scandal. Former federal prosecutor Laurie Levenson told the BBC that Trump has gone further than Nixon ever did, because Nixon did not replace prosecutors who resisted him with ones who would comply. That norm is now gone, replaced by a personnel strategy.
Here is what should actually unsettle people, including people who cannot stand James Comey. The guardrails that failed in this episode were the honorable ones: career prosecutors' judgment, the attorney general's independence, the idea that evidence determines charges. The guardrails that held were clerical ones: an appointments statute, a missing court reporter, a five-year clock, and ordinary citizens on grand juries who twice refused to charge Letitia James. The system did not stop this prosecution because institutions pushed back. It stopped because the execution was sloppy. A more careful version of the same plan, a properly appointed prosecutor, a complete transcript, charges filed a month earlier, might have survived every legal challenge and put a former FBI director on trial on a case career lawyers said should not exist. Nothing in the last three months suggests anyone in power would hesitate to run that play again, and nothing in the law clearly stops the next president, of either party, from running it against your side.
Comey, for his part, responded to the indictment with a video saying, "My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system. And I'm innocent. So let's have a trial." He never got one. In the end, the courts protected him. But the bill for the whole exercise, the careers ended, the money spent, the precedent rehearsed, has already been paid by the public, and the invoice for the next attempt is still open.
Free Game Takeaway
Watch three things. First, the Justice Department's appeal of Judge Currie's ruling: if appellate courts bless serial interim U.S. attorney appointments, any president can cycle prosecutors until one agrees to charge a target, and that ruling will outlive this administration. Second, the 120-day interim appointment mechanism in other districts, because it is now the known pressure point for installing prosecutors without Senate confirmation. Third, the two grand juries that refused to re-indict Letitia James, which showed that citizen grand jurors are a real check and not a rubber stamp; if you are ever called for grand jury service, take it seriously. The practical lesson for everyone else: the protection against selective prosecution is currently procedural, not cultural, which means court fights over prosecutor appointments and statutes of limitation are where accountability now lives. And remember that even a target who wins pays in time, money, and years of legal exposure. The process itself is now a usable weapon, and it can be aimed in any direction by whoever holds power next.