Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Andrew Ross Sorkin, the founder of Dealbook. Every year, I interview some of the world's most influential leaders across politics, culture, and business at the Dealbook Summit, a live event in New York City. On this year's podcast, you'll hear my unfiltered conversations with Gavin Newsom, the CEO of Palantir and Anthropic, and Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk.
Listen to Dealbook Summit wherever you get your podcasts. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On Thursday night, a grand jury indicted the former director of the FBI, James Comey, in a case that Trump has personally demanded that federal prosecutors pursue, despite their own serious doubts about whether Comey committed a crime. Today...
my colleague Devlin Barrett on what's in the indictment and what it means for Trump's ongoing campaign of retribution. It's Friday, September 26th. Devlin, it's late at night, 9.15 on Thursday night, and I'm grateful for you making time for us. Happy to be here.
This, Devlin, is an indictment that we're going to be talking about that President Trump has always wanted to bring against James Comey, his longtime nemesis. But it's an indictment that almost every government prosecutor that has looked at it has actually said, we don't want to bring it because they didn't think there was enough evidence to ever get to a conviction. And yet, here we are.
Yeah, this is a huge moment for the country. You have a former FBI director indicted. And it's huge for a bunch of reasons, but I think most importantly... It is the culmination.
It is the result of a very public and incessant campaign of retribution by President Trump to use the justice system that he resents, that he distrusts, that went after him, to instead use that system to pursue his enemies, to use DOJ as a tool against – the people that he blames for his own legal problems.
And that makes for a frankly scary and tumultuous and uncertain moment at the entire Justice Department, because I don't think anyone who works in that space thinks Trump is going to stop with the indictment of Jim Comey. Right.
And I think just to start, we should put this indictment into that context you just laid out of Trump seeing the Department of Justice as really a tool for personal retribution, very specifically against Comey and just how committed Trump has been to the idea of prosecuting Comey at this point for... Pretty much a decade. So you really need to go back to 2017 when Trump is a new president.
James Comey is a veteran FBI director at that point. And within a matter of months, those two people just distrust each other more and more and more because Comey is leading an investigation into people in Trump's orbit. This is the Russia investigation. Did the Trump campaign collude with Russia? Trump's now president. He hates the existence of this investigation. Right.
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Chapter 2: What led to the indictment of James Comey?
Yep. He's a showboat. He's a grandstander. The FBI has been in turmoil. You know that. I know that. Everybody knows that. And my sense is that even in 2017, pretty much right after he fires James Comey, Trump develops a desire to prosecute him. Right. Because what's happening in that time period is the special counsel investigation is ramping up.
This is becoming a bigger problem for the president. No collusion, no obstruction. He's a leaker. And he increasingly blames those problems on Comey, who he calls a phony, who he calls a leaker. President Trump launched a Sunday morning tweet storm aimed at Comey. The president called Comey a slimeball.
President Trump struck back on Twitter this morning, saying James Comey is a proven leaker and liar. Who he is deeply, deeply suspicious of and thinks is just out there trying to manipulate the government to cause Trump problems and to investigate Trump. He also called the former FBI director, quote, disgruntled and said Comey and others, quote, committed many crimes.
And just to be fair to Trump in this moment, as I recall, Comey eventually makes clear that he did want a special counsel, he did want certain memos he wrote to become public, and he did believe that the president should be further investigated. Right. Comey admitted eventually to putting certain information out that he wanted out there because he thought it was important.
And there are a number of criticisms that are made of Comey's conduct, mostly of his judgment. But time after time, what you see in that period is prosecutors looking at Comey's actions and deciding these aren't really crimes. And that frustrates Trump. And it becomes sort of a very sore point with him. That, you know, why can't he find a prosecutor? Why can't he find an attorney general?
Why can't he find someone loyal enough to him to charge Jim Comey with a crime? And then, as I recall it, the first term comes to an end. There is no prosecution of Jim Comey, as Trump wants. So once Trump gets elected to a second term, what is he doing with his deeply held vengeance for Jim Comey? And how do we get to this point?
He's telling anyone who will listen and most importantly, the people who work for him in the government, they indicted me. Now they need to be indicted. And in Trump's mind, at the top of that list is Jim Comey. And he starts pushing senior Justice Department officials who are in many instances his former criminal defense lawyers. He starts pushing them harder and harder and harder.
to make a criminal case against Comey. But just ordering it isn't enough to necessarily make it happen. The Justice Department is not simply a top-down structure that solely follows orders. There are career prosecutors who are tasked with looking at this. This case ends up being in the Eastern District of Virginia office.
And the prosecutors there look at the evidence and say, you know, this is not a good case. This is not a chargeable crime. And it wasn't just career prosecutors. It was also the Republican pick to run the federal prosecutor's office in the Eastern District of Virginia. And He, too, told his superiors this is not a good case. This is not a case that should be charged. It's simply weak.
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Chapter 3: How does Trump's campaign of retribution relate to Comey's indictment?
In this committee, Chairman Grassley asked you point blank, quote, have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton administration? You responded again under oath, no.
Now, as you know, Mr. McCabe, who works for— You have said before that you did not authorize anyone at the FBI to leak information to reporters. And just to explain quickly, Cruz is asking about both the Russia investigation and the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.
Trump and Republicans, of course, were furious that no charges were brought against Clinton for using that server. Right. And Cruz is basically re-raising this issue because, again, remember, a lot of the Trump complaint, a lot of the Republican complaint about Jim Comey is that he's a leaker and a liar. That's their argument. And so I can only speak to my testimony.
I stand by what the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017. So your testimony is you've never authorized anyone to leak. What Comey says is, that's true, I stand by my prior testimony. But mine is the same today. And that is the thing that the Trump administration, the Justice Department, now says was a lie.
A lie because they have evidence, presumably, that they presented to the grand jury that Comey did instruct an aide to leak to the media, presumably. Someone. One thing that's important to point out about this indictment is that while we know what the statement is that prosecutors say is a lie, we don't know how it's a lie. The indictment doesn't tell us how this is a lie.
It's not clear exactly who Comey allegedly lied.
authorized to leak information it's not clear what information he supposedly authorized to leak so the indictment is very vague on that point got it but it is clear that it says that by denying it comey lied so it sounds like we don't really know what the evidence is based on the indictment that came out tonight but i do want to reflect on something
all of these Department of Justice lawyers, and even their bosses in the first term, said, this case is weak. You shouldn't bring it. And yet, we now have an indictment that was brought and a grand jury that looked at it, evaluated it, and said, yes, We should indict Jim Comey. So should that tell us that perhaps this case isn't as weak as all of these prosecutors thought it was?
It's possible, but think back to the old expression, you can indict a ham sandwich, right? There is a cynical joke that it's extremely easy to indict someone, and that's because of the way the grand jury process works. Well, just explain that. Because prosecutors are the only people who present evidence. They present whatever evidence they want. They don't need the grand jury to be unanimous.
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Chapter 4: What events escalated the conflict between Trump and Comey?
A jury, not a grand jury, a regular old jury. I have to imagine if it gets to that point that Comey's lawyers will point to Trump's very public desire to punish Comey, including that true social posting, which he says to the attorney general, go after Comey and to his firing of the U.S. attorney who refused to bring the case and say that the motives behind this indictment are corrupt.
And I wonder how that might play out. in a courtroom with a jury? So I'll be honest, that issue is more likely to play before the judge than the jury. That's the kind of sort of extraneous to the case itself question that is more likely for a judge to have to wrestle with before a jury does. Got it. And I'll just say, as a general observation,
Those types of arguments, political persecution, unfair, selective prosecution, those types of arguments rarely succeed in court. But you very rarely see the type of political statements, the type of political pressure brought to bear on this case. And so I don't think the normal course of court business is going to be a good way to think about how this particular case proceeds.
I want to put out two scenarios. The first is one in which this case gets to a jury and a jury decides that despite all the reservations of the prosecutors so far, that James Comey is guilty of perjury. Just contemplate for a moment what that would mean and what it would represent. Well, I think, first of all, it would represent an amazing moment in...
This entire saga between Trump and Comey, between Trump and the Justice Department, and between Trump and the legal system writ large. This was a president who last year was facing four indictments. And this year... has successfully gotten his Justice Department to indict the person he probably blames most for his legal problems, whether or not that's fair.
And so I think a conviction in this case, which I think is far from certain, would be sort of a moment of triumph for Trump in this battle that has gone on for seven, eight years and counting. Mm-hmm. And I think a lot of people who have worked at the Justice Department, who have worked at the FBI, already view the indictment as a very sad and frustrating event.
And I think any sort of conviction that drew out of this would be 10 times more so. Well, you're bringing me to the second scenario and the question I have about that, which is let's presume for a moment that Comey is not convicted or that the case never even reaches a jury.
As you're hinting at, for some people, including some people inside the Department of Justice, even if it's tossed out, this is a case where for them a red line has been crossed. Right. I mean, I've had people say to me, a number of current and former DOJ lawyers say to me, the Justice Department, as I knew it, is dead. That is very much the fear that
of a lot of people who either used to work there or currently work there and are worried, greatly worried, about the way in which Trump seems to be getting everything he wants or most of what he wants from the Justice Department. And, you know, look, what he wants clearly in the Comey case and clearly in other cases is he wants retribution. Right.
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