President Donald Trump‘s Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday announced official charges against former FBI Director James Comey, a move that drew blowback from across the political spectrum for what many characterized as Trump’s transparent weaponization of the Justice Department to exact revenge on his perceived enemies.
Newly hired U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, got Comey indicted on two charges, alleging that he made false statements during a congressional testimony about authorizing a leak to The Wall Street Journal concerning the FBI’s 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton‘s email and alleged connections between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.
[NOTE: Halligan replaced Erik Siebert, who did not find evidence sufficient to charge Comey, and resigned his position under pressure from the President. Bondi announced the indictments just days after Trump harangued her on Truth Social, accusing his AG of being “all talk, no action.” Concluding that “Nothing is being done” to pursue the likes of Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff and New York AG Letitia James, Trump warned Bondi “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Trump defended what many saw as an illegal threat afterwards — see below — saying of the DOJ “they have to act.”
Q: "Are you criticizing Pam Bondi for not going after your political adversaries?" Trump: "No. I just want people to act. They have to act. And we want to act fast…If they are guilty or if they should be charged, they should be charged. And we have to do it now."
— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) September 20, 2025 at 9:10 PM
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On Friday, National Review columnist Andy McCarthy, a former Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) for the Southern District of New York who worked with then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, told Fox News, “I don’t think this case even gets to trial.”
McCarthy added: “The only way you could convict Comey beyond a reasonable doubt is Comey would have to truly believe that he personally had authorized the leak, he would have [to have] actually authorized the leak, and then he would have had to know that he was lying when he denied it to the Senate. They’re not even going to be able to prove that he authorized the leak because — by all accounts — he didn’t.”
McCarthy: I love Ted but McCabe never said that Comey authorized it.
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 26, 2025
They're not going to be able to prove he authorized the leak. By all accounts he didn't. I don't think this case even gets to trial. pic.twitter.com/mpLouSuZ19
On Monday, the National Review published McCarthy’s new op-ed titled ‘With More Scrutiny, the Trump DOJ Indictment of Comey Gets Worse,’ with the subtitle, “There is no provable false-statements case against the former FBI director.”
[NOTE: McCarthy is hardly a centrist — his 2019 book Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency asserted that the Trump-Russia connection was a “studiously crafted illusion” and contended — with an approving blurb from Rush Limbaugh — that the “real collusion in the 2016 election was not between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin [but] between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration.”]
Concerning the Comey charges, McCarthy sees what might also appear as a “studiously crafted illusion” in a court of law, saying the false-statement indictment gets “worse” upon further reflection.
McCarthy wrote: “The Trump Justice Department’s false-statement indictment against former FBI Director James Comey is so ill-conceived that the longer one analyzes it, the worse it gets. Plus, it is incoherently drafted, such that it fails to fulfill an indictment’s constitutional purpose; namely, to put the defendant on notice of what the government alleges he has done to violate the law.”
