New Orleans The Trump program to destroy and dominate the Justice Department continues apace, but not without some rough spots in the road. James Comey, former head of the FBI and Trump revenge target over the last decade, and his family continue to be rocks where the president is stubbing his toe.
The administration and his ever-compliant Attorney General Pam Bondi, forced out the US Attorney in Virginia who couldn’t find sufficient ground to indict Comey. Bondi and Trump solved that problem, or so they thought, by installing a former Trump personal lawyer with a background in insurance law, as the acting US Attorney for that district of Virginia. She promptly followed orders from the top and secured an indictment.
Trump and Bondi likely thought to themselves, “so far so good.” They suffered from premature certainty, it seems. The judge assigned a magistrate to look into the grand jury proceedings arising in the Comey indictment. In a long opinion, he found – in laymen’s terms – that it was a hot mess. Such a mess that the judge may have to vacate the indictment. The rookie interim US Attorney may have alluded to evidence not produced, may have bungled the charge statements, and submitted a less than complete record. It was such a travesty that the magistrate ordered that the entire file of the normally secret grand jury proceedings be turned over to Comey’s lawyers, allowing them to challenge the indictment. The odds appear better than even that the whole thing will be thrown out.
That’s not all, of course. Another court is hearing a petition from Comey’s lawyers that challenges whether the interim US Attorney was even properly appointed. Several courts have already ruled around the country that many of these interim appointments by Bondi were deficient without Congressional approval. In effect, Comey may have two bites at the apple of denying Trump his revenge.
And, then there’s the matter of Comey’s daughter. She was working in the US Attorney’s office in New York and had been a seasoned litigator there for the last ten years. She was summarily fired without any other apparent cause than her relationship to her father. She was not a political appointee, but a federal employee of the Justice Department protected by the Federal Civil Service code in operation for more than a century back to the Progressive Era. As the Times reports,
According to the latest version of the law, passed in 1978, employees are entitled to “fair and equitable treatment … without regard to political affiliation … and with proper regard for their privacy and constitutional rights,” and personnel actions (including firings) must be based on merit and fitness, and must not be arbitrary, capricious or discriminatory. According to her legal claim, Ms. Comey was fired in violation of these provisions. Her lawsuit is a nearly perfect test case, because she had an impeccable record as a prosecutor.
If she wins her case against the administration, she may also end up winning protections for federal employees in general.
This won’t stop Trump’s efforts to win revenge, regardless of the law, but it would be sweet justice if the one of the results was Comey walking free and inadvertently federal employees finally winning the kind protections that the law was meant to guarantee against the arbitrary actions of their employer, in this case the president.