OPINION: 86 vengeful prosecutions

May 3-The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey on a charge of threatening the life of President Donald J. Trump is ridiculous on its face. The real threat is Mr. Trump himself and his minions - to Americans' freedom of speech. Mr. Trump and his acting attorney general and former personal attorney, Todd Blanche, surely know the indictment of Mr. Comey will not hold up in court. The same doubtless goes for U.S. Attorney W. Ellis Boyle and Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew R. Petracca, who brought this case in the Eastern District of North Carolina. Mr. Comey's "offense" was to post on social media last May an image of seashells arranged to read "8647." It was a play on the term "86," a slang term for "remove" that originated in the world of food service, and the fact that Mr. Trump became the 47th president when he won a second term in 2024. Of course, convicting Mr. Comey and sending him to jail is hardly the point. Burdening him with the anxiety, public opprobrium and cost of defending himself is a more likely motive. The courts, in throwing this out, should make the government pay for Mr. Comey's legal fees. But this isn't just about trying to harass and silence Mr. Comey. It's about sending a message to all Mr. Trump's critics, the sort of message authoritarian thugs around the world deploy their henchmen to deliver: Shut up - or maybe we'll come for you, too. The "8647" slogan has been widely used by Mr. Trump's critics as shorthand calling for his ouster - not through violent means, but through the legal steps of - in the case of this second-termer - impeachment or the 25th Amendment process of removing a president for inability to do his job. But the indictment alleges that "a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret (the image) as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States." How prosecutors persuaded a grand jury to buy such nonsense is hard to fathom, but as a New York judge once famously observed, a competent prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. This all stems from Mr. Trump's animosity toward Mr. Comey, who as FBI director led an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey in 2017, a sacking that became one of the key issues in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of whether Mr. Trump's campaign conspired with Russia and whether Mr. Trump sought to obstruct the probe. After he was returned to office, Mr. Trump got the Justice Department to indict Mr. Comey on charges that he had lied to Congress in 2020 about media leaks during the Russia investigation. That indictment was dismissed because the U.S. attorney who pursued it, Lindsey Halligan, had not been properly appointed. She, too, had been a personal attorney of Mr. Trump's. The irony of all this is that if anyone has been engaging in threatening behavior and violent rhetoric, it's Mr. Trump. He has openly called for violence against his political adversaries. Among them: former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, who was the leading Republican on a House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection and was sharply critical of Mr. Trump. "Let's put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?" Mr. Trump said of her in 2024. "Let's see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face." Last November, when Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain, and five members of Congress made a video reminding members of the military of their legal obligation to not follow illegal orders, Mr. Trump turned to social media to accuse Mr. Kelly of "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH." Perhaps most heinously, Mr. Trump incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. So, "8647" indeed - and lest the FBI come knocking, by that we mean: Remove this president from office through the constitutional process of impeachment and conviction, for the long train of high crimes, misdemeanors, and blatant abuses of power going back long before his latest attack on Mr. Comey's First Amendment rights.

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