A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
‘Problematic’ and ‘Likely Insurmountable Problems’
Prior reporting had already suggested that a key witness in the bogus prosecution of former FBI Director Jim Comey was not helpful to prosecutors, but ABC News has a new story out this morning that expands on the obstacle the witness presents to interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s case.
The witness is longtime Comey friend Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University.
ABC News has consistently had good sources seemingly from within the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Its sources for the latest story are familiar with the contents of the internal memo in which career prosecutors laid out the reasons for not seeking an indictment of Comey. That decision led Trump to force out then-acting U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert (Trump’s own nominee for the permanent post) and replace him with Halligan, who promptly indicted the case personally.
As I read the ABC News story, the quoted phrases “problematic” and “likely insurmountable problems” are directly from the memo declining to prosecute:
Federal prosecutors investigating former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly making false statements to Congress determined that a central witness in their probe would prove “problematic” and likely prevent them from establishing their case to a jury, sources familiar with their findings told ABC News. …
According to prosecutors who investigated the circumstances surrounding Comey’s 2020 testimony for two months, using Richman’s testimony to prove that Comey knowingly provided false statements to Congress would result in “likely insurmountable problems” for the prosecution.
Investigators detailed those conclusions in a lengthy memo last month recommending that the office not move forward in charging Comey, according to sources familiar with the memo’s contents.
To put it bluntly, a key witness is “hostile,” in the words of Halligan’s deputy, to the prosecution’s case. Some cases can survive that kind of weakness, but prosecutors in Virginia and earlier in DC, have failed to find additional evidence that Comey lied to Congress as alleged. So there’s precious little evidence for prosecutors to use to overcome the weakness presented by Richman:
Investigators who reviewed material from Comey’s emails, including his correspondence with Richman, could not identify an instance when Comey approved leaking material to a reporter anonymously, sources told ABC News.
What’s this all mean?
(1) It reinforces Halligan’s prosecutorial misconduct in seeking an indictment against Comey despite the fatal flaws with the case already identified and spelled out by prosecutors.
(2) It shows how vulnerable the case will be to dismissal (on various grounds) before it ever gets to trial.
(3) It confirms that the point of this whole exercise – and of all of Trump’s politically motivated prosecutions – is to damage the target’s reputation, force them to spend time and money defending themselves, and in some instances take them off the political playing field (or at least wrong-foot them). A successful conviction is just icing; it’s not the ultimate objective.
One other point separate from the ABC News story: Halligan is still likely to face a challenge to the validity of her appointment as interim U.S. attorney, same as Trump interim USAs in New Jersey and Nevada. Whether it’s Comey or another criminal defendant in the Eastern District, someone is going to make that argument, and if they win it would likely nullify the Comey indictment that Halligan personally presented to the grand jury.
Comey is in court this morning in Alexandria, Virginia, for his arraignment.
Dark Times and Getting Darker
I’ve become a lot more circumspect over the last decade about trumpeting the worst trolling of the MAGA right because so much of it is performative and intended to shock, provoke, and stir the pot. But since President Trump and GOP elected officials started using the assassination of Charlie Kirk to paint all political opposition as terroristic, violent, and radical, the rhetoric has shifted to a darker, more ominous place than we’ve seen in U.S. politics in at least a century.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a GOP Senate candidate, is a leading MAGA troll but the press release he put out yesterday in his official capacity is so propagandistic and chilling in the tale it spins that it serves as a good indicator of where things stand right now. It reads in part:
In response to the political assassination of national hero Charlie Kirk and the disturbing rise of leftist violence across the country, Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched undercover investigations into various groups affiliated with left-wing political violence known to be operating in Texas.
“Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. Corrupted ideologies like transgenderism and Antifa are a cancer on our culture and have unleashed their deranged and drugged-up foot soldiers on the American people,” said Attorney General Paxton. “The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk marks a turning point in America. There can be no compromise with those who want us dead. To that end, I have directed my office to continue its efforts to identify, investigate, and infiltrate these leftist terror cells. To those demented souls who seek to kill, steal, and destroy our country, know this: you cannot hide, you cannot escape, and justice is coming.”
During yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee testimony of Attorney General Pam Bondi, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) used similarly chilling language:
What Civil Society Can Do To Beat Trumpism
“The struggle over regime change is about whether the aspiring authoritarians can subdue civil society. Their strategy is to play divide and conquer, rewarding friends and brutally punishing opponents. They win when society cracks, creating a self-enforcing set of expectations, in which everyone shuts up and complies because everyone expects everyone else to shut up and comply, too.”–Henry Farrell, professor of democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins
Welcome to the Era of Kavanaugh Raids
We talked last week about “Kavanaugh stops,” a word play on Terry stops, morbid legal humor for ICE’s detention of U.S. citizens caught up in President Trump’s authoritarian mass deportation system. But Garrett Graff draws a different historical parallel: the Palmer raids conducted by President Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1919-1920:
Palmer oversaw a series of sweeping raids against suspected Communists during the country’s first Red Scare (there are two and they’re worth distinguishing between!) that ultimately led to the arrests and detention of perhaps as many as 10,000 people across nearly 40 US cities. The raids were led by a rising bureaucratic star named J. Edgar Hoover. Many arrests and seizures happened absent any warrants; many “radicals” were detained for simply being members of entirely legal organizations.
Quote of the Day
Here, I will say that this effort to use the military against American citizens — an effort backed, it seems, by almost the entire Republican Party — makes a mockery of the longstanding conservative claim that theirs is a movement of small government and states’ rights. Trump’s push to invade cities using the National Guard is as aggressive a use of federal power as one can imagine. And as we think about antecedents to this administration, this particular episode is structurally similar to the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required the citizens and officials of Northern free states to act as slave catchers against their will and often against the laws of the states in which they lived.
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