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.

In Judge Michael Nachmanoff’s federal courtroom, government lawyers stood up and, with all the confidence of a toddler holding a dripping marker near a freshly painted wall, admitted that yes, the indictment Comey is charged under was never presented to the full grand jury. They removed a count the grand jury had explicitly rejected and then ushered the foreperson, and inexplicably, a deputy foreperson, into a private room to sign off on the edited version like it was a yearbook and not, say, a constitutionally required vote of a deliberative body.

Then they marched this Franken-indictment into court, slapped it down on the judge’s desk, and said “Here you go, Your Honor.” And on Wednesday, under questioning, they finally admitted the truth: the grand jury itself was not invited to participate in the grand jury process.

You truly cannot make this up.

And yet they did.

The prosecutor’s attempt to downplay this was almost poetic in its absurdity. Assistant U.S. Attorney Tyler Lemons, whose name really should be changed to protect the innocent, actually argued aloud that the revised indictment “wasn’t a new indictment.” Which is like saying renovation isn’t renovation if you simply bulldoze the kitchen. It’s the kind of logic that can only take root in a government supervised by a man who writes executive orders at 2 a.m. based on whatever he saw on OANN.

Judge Nachmanoff, to his credit, did not laugh. But the courtroom did produce one of those rare, delicious, audible gasps, the courtroom equivalent of a spit take, as everyone realized what prosecutors were confessing. You could almost hear the air rushing out of the prosecution’s credibility like the world’s saddest party balloon.

What makes the whole spectacle even more grotesque is that the hearing was supposed to be about Comey’s claim of vindictive prosecution, the argument that Trump used the Justice Department as his personal Mafia to settle political grudges. And for a brief moment, before the revelation of the phantom indictment set the courtroom on fire, that issue actually took center stage. Dreeben, a man so respected in appellate law that his résumé might as well be carved into granite, laid out in painstaking chronological detail the moments when Trump raged at Comey on social media, and the corresponding moments when Trump demanded someone, anyone, indict him.

The timeline is about as subtle as a toddler’s finger painting: Comey publishes a book. Trump screams. Comey criticizes him. Trump screams louder. Three separate DOJ investigations conclude there’s no case. Trump fires the U.S. attorney who told him “no.” Trump installs Halligan, a political aide with no prosecutorial experience, days before the statute of limitations expires. Trump posts publicly that Comey is “guilty as hell” and must be charged. Halligan sprints into a grand jury room so quickly she leaves skid marks, and suddenly, magically, the indictment Trump demanded materializes.

If this were not happening in real life, it would be rejected as lazy screenwriting.

But it did happen, and now the Justice Department is standing in court pretending that this is all very normal, and definitely not the work of a president who thinks the rule of law is something that applies exclusively to other people. Their argument, distilled, is essentially: “Sure, the president spent years screaming that he wanted Comey prosecuted as retribution for perceived slights, and sure, Trump personally fired the prosecutor who refused to indict, and sure, the replacement prosecutor had never prosecuted so much as a parking violation, and sure, the indictment she rushed through was never shown to the grand jury, but really, Your Honor, we swear this is all fine.”

You can almost admire the audacity. Or you could, if the stakes were not so breathtakingly high. These people are not merely incompetent; they are incompetent in charge of the nuclear codes.

The hearing took an even darker turn when Judge Nachmanoff pressed Lemons about whether the previous U.S. attorney, Erik Siebert, had written a declination memo explaining why Comey should not be charged. Lemons tried to dodge the question, claiming he was under orders from Deputy AG Todd Blanche not to say whether the memo exists. The courtroom’s collective eyes rolled so hard they nearly registered seismic activity. The Washington Post later confirmed from two independent sources that the memo exists, and the DOJ is now furiously burying it like a dog hiding a chewed-up couch cushion.

We also learned this week that U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick issued a blistering opinion cataloging misconduct, misstatements, and even potential abuses of attorney-client privilege during the grand jury proceedings. Fitzpatrick was so alarmed that he took the extraordinary step of granting Comey access to the full grand jury record, something courts guard like sacred relics, before Nachmanoff temporarily paused the order so the DOJ can finish hyperventilating.

And so the Comey case, once advertised by Trump as his big score, proof that the walls were closing in on his enemies, is now in the sort of legal death spiral from which no case returns. Not because of complicated constitutional questions or intricate evidentiary disputes, but because the people running the prosecution apparently can’t perform the first-grade-level task of letting the grand jury see the indictment they’re supposed to approve.

It would be funny if it weren’t terrifying. Actually, it’s the precise emotional cocktail you get watching a cat batting a live grenade around the living room, it’s cute until you notice the spoon isn’t in anymore.

This is what happens when the machinery of government is seized by a man who believes the Justice Department is nothing more than a weapon to bludgeon political opponents, staffed by flunkies whose only qualifications are blind loyalty and the ability to say “Yes, sir” without blinking. It is not merely corruption or incompetence. It is the dangerous fusion of both, a kakistocracy running on fumes, weaponized for revenge, and held together with duct tape, loyalty oaths, and whatever spare office supplies they can glue into an indictment.

And they have their fingers on the launch codes.

The Comey indictment will almost certainly collapse, the only suspense now is which judge delivers the fatal blow and how many pages his opinion needs to describe the flaming wreckage. But the damage is done. Trump’s Justice Department has once again shown the country exactly what happens when you give unchecked power to people with unchecked grudges.