James Comey has attracted outside support in his bid to show that his prosecution is unconstitutionally vindictive and selective. Among the third parties who have weighed in to argue that the former FBI director’s case should be dismissed is a group of scholars who study democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism around the world.
In an amicus brief to the Virginia federal judge considering Comey’s motion, they wrote that the case “mirrors many of the features of politicized prosecutions” in the countries they study, namely Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela.
They summed up the Comey case like this:
President Trump’s public statements demonstrate that he has long viewed Mr. Comey as an adversary; the President violated longstanding norms of prosecutorial independence in directing his Attorney General to bring the instant charges; and it was only after the previous U.S. Attorney departed that the newly-installed U.S. Attorney, formerly a personal attorney to the President, presented the indictment to the grand jury — over the objections of career prosecutors who concluded they lacked evidence to do so.
Against that backdrop, the scholars argue it is essential to view the case “in the larger context of how politicized prosecutions are used in autocracies and backsliding democracies and the risks that even one such prosecution poses.”
The former FBI director pleaded not guilty earlier this month to charges of lying to and obstructing Congress in connection with 2020 congressional testimony.
His pending motion based on his claim of vindictive and selective prosecution is just one of several arguments he’s raising that could get the case dismissed before trial. And the scholarly brief represents just one of the outside efforts against the Trump administration, with others including a bipartisan group of former federal judges and prosecutors who write that the case “presents the precise danger to the rule of law which the Founders sought to eliminate in creating an independent judiciary.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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