Vice President JD Vance has promised that more political retribution against Donald Trump’s enemies is coming.
Vance was interviewed on Fox News Sunday by Martha MacCallum about the criminal indictment of former FBI Director James Comey and insisted that “certainly” more criminal charges would be issued under Trump.
“Well, there’s certainly gonna be more indictments coming over the next three and a half years of the Trump administration, but we’re always going to let the law drive this stuff, and the facts of the case, and not political motivations,” said Vance.
“Which frankly makes us so much different from the Biden administration, where they indicted not just the president of the United States but so many people who were engaged in policymaking.”
MacCallum noted that one of the targets of Trump’s intended retribution was Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, whose reason for incurring Trump’s ire stems from his participation in the first impeachment of the president in 2020, when he served as an impeachment manager.
Schiff is one of several Democrats the president has leaned on his subordinates to threaten with criminal charges. Others include Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, whose prosecution of Trump for tax fraud was ultimately nullified by his re-election, and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Despite White House efforts to pressure the DOJ into pursuing prosecutions, Vance and others have tried to dismiss descriptions of a politicized Justice Department as inaccurate.
On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, the Senate’s top Republican took a similar stance. Sen. John Thune told Kristen Welker that he had confidence in the courts to sort out whether the indictment of Comey for obstruction and lying to Congress, as it related to his 2020 testimony to the House Oversight Committee, held water. He also pushed back against the notion that GOP congressional leadership, himself included, was too deferential to the Republican president.
“It’s based upon the findings of a grand jury, Kristen,” Thune told Welker, noting that the Senate Judiciary Committee had also looked into the matter of whether Comey had lied to Congress. “It was by a jury of his peers.
“I trust the judicial system and the justice system to figure this out,” he continued.
During his tenure as FBI director under Obama and the first Trump administration, Comey oversaw two investigations with extreme political consequences: the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probe into the first Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia.
He was eventually fired by Trump halfway through the president’s first year in office. Before his firing, he clashed repeatedly with the president over his refusal to assert publicly that the president himself was not being investigated for possible criminal activity.
Comey was a frequent target of Trump on Truth Social in the run-up to his indictment.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” the president wrote in one revealing rant last Saturday. He followed up after Comey’s charging: “JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI.”
Trump has also maintained that he is not personally involved in the DoJ’s decision-making.
At the Eastern District of Virginia, where Comey’s indictment was filed, a 36-year-old acting U.S. attorney with no prosecutorial experience, Lindsey Halligan, is leading the case against the former FBI director, after her predecessor resigned in protest over a refusal to file charges against James, the New York AG. One of the three counts filed against Comey by the acting prosecutor was rejected. Halligan previously was a White House aide.
