Comey’s comeuppance

OPINION:

Donald Trump’s indictment of former FBI Director James B. Comey is unprecedented. When Democrats prosecute political opponents, they arrange armed raids at dawn and provide live CNN coverage of the perp walk. They place septuagenarian suspects in leg irons, just because.

Mr. Trump has done none of that.

Nor has he followed the lead of President Biden’s minions in denying defendants an impartial hearing. Through careful venue selection, the former administration ensured that foes faced a jury pool with only a 6% statistical chance of finding someone whose car didn’t have a “Kamala Harris for President” bumper sticker. Magistrates assigned to the cases were invariably Democratic appointees.

Mr. Comey, by contrast, was granted the courtesy of surrendering after being accused of lying to Congress. Roger Stone, convicted for irrelevant boasting about WikiLeaks, received the shock-and-awe treatment. “The charges are identical to those against me. So why not the same manner of arrest?” Mr. Stone inquired on X.

The former top G-man will have his day in an Eastern District of Virginia courtroom, where political affiliations are closer to balance. Judges in the jurisdiction have a well-earned reputation for doing the bidding of the intelligence community, of which Mr. Comey was a longtime member.

To keep his freedom, Mr. Comey must justify the tales he spun before a congressional committee on Sept. 30, 2020. He insisted that his inquiry into “Russian election interference” was above reproach. Still, he feigned amnesia when queried about his knowledge of Hillary Clinton’s “swift boat” plan to manufacture the impression that Mr. Trump was a Russian agent.

In 2017, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, asked the FBI chief whether he authorized media leaks in politically charged investigations. Mr. Comey said simply, “No.” In 2020, Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, asked again: “So your testimony is you’ve never authorized anyone to leak?”

Mr. Comey answered: “I stand by my testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017.” The Justice Department’s inspector general concluded Mr. Comey underhandedly delivered confidential information to a New York Times reporter through his buddy, Daniel Richman, a private lawyer deputized as a special employee of the FBI for that purpose. The ruse is laid out in the FBI’s internal “Arctic Haze” inquiry into the unauthorized disclosures.

In a 2016 Oval Office meeting, President Obama discussed Mrs. Clinton’s underhanded Russia scheme. Contemporaneous notes document Mr. Comey’s presence. As long as Democrats were in the White House, Mr. Comey believed himself so untouchable that he could openly daydream about imprisoning Mr. Trump.

“They would just put him in a double-wide somewhere out near the fence, out in the grass, and he would eat there, he’d shower there, he’d exercise there, he’d be away from general population, but it’s obviously doable,” the former lawman told Jen Psaki, Mr. Obama’s former spokesman, on her MSNBC show.

Mr. Comey won’t be put in a double-wide. In fact, the odds remain in his favor since Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff, an appointee of Mr. Biden, will decide his fate. That’s fine. What matters most is that his plotting against the president of the United States from inside the Hoover Building will become public record and part of the history books.

“People who lie are held accountable,” Mr. Comey wrote on X in 2018. “If we are untethered to truth, our justice system cannot function and a society based on the rule of law dissolves.” Indeed.