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DDonald Trump was very clear On his 2024 bid for the presidency: He wasn’t just running for the White House — he was Coming after his enemies.
Now, there’s James Comey Became the first member of the Washington Foundation and the allegedly Democratic-aligned “Deep State”, to find out what that means.
On Wednesday morning, former FBI director was convicted in two cases In a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. After facing two counts, Comey did not speak to reporters and spoke only a few words in court as he pleaded not guilty. Lying to Congress and creating obstruction.
Democrats took issue with aggressive and verbally abusive Attorney General Pam Bondi during a hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, but for many in the party the reality is simple: Trump ran on the issue of weaponizing the Justice Department against Democrats largely because of the failure of every possible mechanism for law enforcement to take seriously the prosecution of his many alleged crimes. Won.
Most members of the party – and also a large portion of the voting base – agree that the Democrats’ failure to immediately initiate criminal proceedings and transfer power to Joe Biden’s administration after January 6 proved a serious mistake.
Despite two lawsuits being brought against the President surrounding the former President’s actions in his final days in office and his departure from the White House, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland failed to see either case concluded before the 2024 elections were held. The same was true for state-level prosecutions in New York and Georgia.
Since January, more and more senior party members have come forward to accept this reality. The most telling admission came from Jerry Nadler, previously the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, now retiring in 2026. Nadler said earlier this year: “Garland initiated the prosecution only after being compelled by the January 6 committee report and criminal referral. The evidence that the January 6 committee used was available from the beginning.”
“If they had gone ahead with those trials, I think he would have been convicted and we would now have a different president,” concluded Nadler, who added: “Merrick Garland wasted a year.”
However, to be clear: Garland totally didn’t do this. waste one year. He spent much of 2021 pursuing the January 6 cases, even though these were not the cases that mattered: During Biden’s tenure, the Justice Department identified, prosecuted, and secured convictions against more than 1,200 participants in the January 6 riot, often combing hours of bodycam and social media footage to find Trump-supporting J6ers who beat up police, stole and Destroyed property, or committed other crimes on the day of the attack.
Donald Trump pardoned them all.
Garland came under intense political pressure to convict Trump in 2022, especially after the January 6 publication of the committee’s full report and the panel’s submission of criminal referrals to the Justice Department, including the former president. In rare comments about the case that year, Garland said Trump’s potential 2024 candidacy would not affect his handling of the case.
“We don’t pay any attention to other issues [the January 6 investigation]Garland told NBC News.
The Attorney General’s inexplicable naivete about the Trump team’s decision to wait until January 2022 to launch a formal investigation into the effort to pressure states and Congress into accepting false slates of electors stems from his refusal to make any decisions born out of fear that they might be seen as politicizing the agency.
This forced Garland to ignore reality: Trump’s third bid for the presidency was in many ways an open bid to fund his legal defense and, ultimately, secure immunity from accountability. Detention was the issue, and Garland himself contributed to that dynamic by practically waiting until the midterms to issue formal impeachment.
Another factor to consider: A successful prosecution was the only way for Garland to avoid the appearance of a weaponized Justice Department in the hands of a Democratic president. Trump’s acquittal would have tarnished the department’s reputation for obvious reasons, and a successful run-out by a once more sitting president would have allowed him to fulfill his promise to destroy the DoJ’s independence, forcing career prosecutors who had refused to resign to target the president’s enemies with weak cases.
Garland and Biden, the Democrats who picked him for the job (Somewhat ironically, as a middle finger to Trump) aren’t the only ones facing political consequences for the failure to bring the cases against Trump to the end. In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fanny Willis is facing her own political humiliation after being thrown out of the case against the Trump team’s efforts to pressure state officials after the 2024 election due to misconduct, and another RICO case, brought against rapper Young Thug, ended largely without fireworks.
A local columnist from Georgia wrote about willis Late last month: “It’s also important to note that Willis launched her grand-jury investigation into Trump’s effort to steal the election in February 2021, at a time when federal officials were showing less pressure to do so. It should not have been left to a local prosecutor to handle a case of this size and consequence… If she blew it, Attorney General Merrick Garland and the federal Justice Department made it even worse.”
Comey, more than most, should understand the importance of living up to the reputation of politicizing a supposedly non-partisan office. During his time at the FBI, he oversaw two investigations against political figures with large-scale election implications: the investigation of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, and the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for State Department business.
Both ended with a low thud; He declared that Clinton was “reckless” but not malicious or law-breaking, which earned him anger from Democrats, who considered the timing of his Nothingburger announcement fatal for Clinton’s 2016 campaign. He never saw the end of the investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign: he was fired by the president before that. But that, too, ended without a connection between the Trump campaign and the Russian government being established, or allegations related to that connection coming to light.
Now he and others who spent so much energy avoiding the appearance of politicization of the justice system are facing a situation that has been weaponized against them for political purposes. Comey’s own indictment came under the deadline imposed by the statute of limitations for his two alleged crimes — proof that the president has a long memory.
Here can be seen the threads connecting the Democratic Party’s response to this failure to date. Although Democrats have few options to counter political prosecutions at the Justice Department, voters across the party are feeling angry at senior leaders for seizing the moment and refusing to take political risks.
Even as Chuck Schumer acknowledges voters’ anger and embraces the idea of ​​gaining leverage against Republicans, he is lambasted as a “human flat tire” by Jon Stewart and other fed-up Democrats.
For many on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the half-measures defined the entire Biden presidency too late. The entire breadth of the party’s ideological spectrum is also likely to soon come to terms with that definition, with others reportedly on the president’s enemies list, including New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff.