America’s First DIY Indictment Kit

Trump’s Justice Department couldn’t persuade a grand jury, so they apparently just edited the indictment themselves, and now the whole prosecution is going up in smoke on the record.

If you were hoping that the Trump-era Department of Justice had finally exhausted its supply of institutional decay and slapstick authoritarianism, Wednesday’s hearing in United States v. James Comey will disabuse you of that optimism. You might have thought we’d already reached peak kakistocracy years ago, somewhere between Sharpiegate and that unforgettable moment when Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye made a break for freedom. Alas, there is always further to fall.

This week, it turns out the Justice Department managed to indict a former FBI Director on an indictment the grand jury never actually saw, discussed, nor voted on. Never even sniffed. Somewhere in the bowels of the Eastern District of Virginia, a prosecutor apparently decided that the best way to handle the pesky fact that the grand jury rejected the first indictment was to simply, and this is a technical legal term, “cut and paste their way into a new reality.”

And so, the DOJ’s star witness against James Comey turned out to be a Xerox machine. Except even the Xerox isn’t cooperating anymore.