"Those words struck a chord with me and my colleagues attending the event. Comey's steady hand had helped transform the department's ability to respond effectively to terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; he also strengthened the ability of federal prosecutors like me to respond to the post-Enron accounting fraud scandals. Most important, despite these cataclysmic episodes, unique in our history, Comey helped to bolster the DOJ's reputation for responding to and addressing any manner of national crisis."
"Today that same James Comey who had extolled and defended the ideal of equal justice during his time at the DOJ finds himself the object of a grotesque and unfounded abuse of the law as a cudgel to punish political opponents. Last week, he was served a flimsy indictment handed down from an inexperienced and handpicked Trump flunky, Lindsey Halligan, following the president's abrupt dismissal of her predecessor, who had insisted, correctly, that there were no credible charges to be brought against Comey."
Jim Comey used a pond metaphor to represent the reservoir of public trust in the Department of Justice and hoped his tenure had not let that trust dissipate. His tenure strengthened DOJ responses to terrorism after 9/11 and improved federal prosecution capacity after the Enron accounting scandals. Those efforts bolstered the Department of Justice's reputation for nonpartisan crisis response. Over time, partisan politics began to infect the department's crisis-response ability. Comey is now facing a politically influenced indictment brought by a handpicked and inexperienced prosecutor, signaling a prosecutorial model likely to spread beyond this single case.
Read at The Nation
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