A U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia is preparing to issue a formal indictment against James Comey, the FBI director who ran the agency when it investigated both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, MSNBC News reported on Wednesday.
The formal charges were not known, MSNBC reported, but were likely to include a charge of lying under oath to Congress when he testified to the House Oversight Committee and denied authorizing leaks to the media.
If the indictment goes forward, it would make the former FBI director the first on a list of Donald Trump’s enemies targeted by his administration to be formally charged, though the president has urged Attorney General Pam Bondi and his various other deputies to pursue prosecutions against other Democrats and political foes, including Sen. Adam Schiff and Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook.
Comey was fired during the president’s first term after Trump grew sufficiently impatient with the months-long investigation taken over by the Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert Mueller, in 2017.
The investigation was originally launched by Comey into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Comey clashed with Trump repeatedly before his firing over his refusal to confirm that Trump personally was not under investigation for criminal activity.
The Independent reported previously this month that the president was receiving frequent reports from two of his MAGA operatives stationed at the Justice Department and Federal Housing Finance Agency as he sought to engineer criminal prosecutions of his enemies. At the Justice Department, special prosecutor Ed Martin is reporting directly to the president outside of the typical DOJ chain of command as he participates in the scheme, which has frustrated some senior Justice leadership.
Another one of those loyalists was just installed as acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, and according to MSNBC represents one of the final missing links in the chain connecting Trump’s ambitions of targeting his political enemies and reality.
Halligan has no prosecutorial experience or background in national security, two factors which put her at a disadvantage as she steps into the role of acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, which given its proximity to the capital often tries such cases. She previously served as a White House aide, and helped lead the effort to Trumpify the Smithsonian Institution.
This is a developing story. More to follow…
