Comey Shows That Donald Trump’s Contempt for America Knows No Bounds

Trump has done many terrible things, has attempted in many ways to place himself above the law. But the Comey indictment is clearly the most egregious. The New York Times, which I’ve criticized in the past for dancing around saying what really needs to be said about Trump in its news columns, actually rose to the occasion this morning in its news analysis piece: “An inexperienced prosecutor loyal to President Trump, in the job for less than a week, filed criminal charges against one of her boss’s most-reviled opponents. She did so not only at Mr. Trump’s direct command, but also against the urging of both her own subordinates and her predecessor, who had just been fired for raising concerns that there was insufficient evidence to indict.”

That inexperienced attorney, whose name you need to commit to memory because it will live in infamy in this country’s history, is Lindsey Halligan. She has never been a prosecutor. She was an insurance lawyer in Florida. She chased tornadoes. And it almost goes without saying that she represented insurance companies against ordinary people. Trump somehow spotted her one day when he was golfing and she was playing tennis (and, oh, she’s a former Miss Colorado), and he invited her onto his legal team.

MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian, who with his colleague Carol Leonnig has been doing the best reporting on all this, said on Morning Joe Friday morning that she presented the case to the grand jury herself. None of the line prosecutors in an office of more than 100 attorneys would even join her. Yes, it must be admitted: She did get these citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia to bring these two charges (she failed to convince them of a third charge whose contents aren’t yet known). But the fact that no career prosecutor would join her speaks to the flimsiness of the case.