The Justice Department has opened criminal investigations into two longtime targets of President Donald Trump's ire: former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan. The move not only is a sign of escalating authoritarian energy in the Trump administration, but it also buttresses the president's attempts to try to rewrite history.
Federal law enforcement isn’t meant to serve as a vehicle for political retribution.
A Justice Department spokesperson told NBC News that the department does “not comment on ongoing investigations.” NBC News, citing a source briefed on the matter, reports that CIA Director John Ratcliffe had made a criminal referral of Brennan to the Justice Department and that it's unclear what prompted the Comey investigation.
NBC News reports that Ratcliffe “released an internal CIA review that criticized Brennan’s handling of a 2017 intelligence assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.” (That review found flaws in the assessment but didn’t dispute the assessment's overall conclusion about Putin's agenda to tip the election in Trump's favor.) NBC also notes that “any conduct that took place during that campaign or even in most of Trump’s first term is now outside the typical five-year statute of limitations for federal crimes.”
While we don't know the details of the investigations, we do know that Trump has long seen both Comey and Brennan as his political adversaries. Trump once said Comey showed "guts" when he re-opened an investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email server 11 days before the 2016 election. But he fired Comey early in his first term while Comey was overseeing an investigation into whether Trump's presidential campaign and associates colluded with Russia in 2016 to influence the election. While he originally claimed it was because of Comey's handling of Clinton's email server, that claim made no sense, and he later said he was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he fired him.
The FBI declined comment to NBC News, but if the bureau is involved, then Director Kash Patel's animosity toward Comey and Brennan becomes relevant, as well. Both men were on a list of “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State” that Patel published before he became FBI director.
Based on what we know so far, it seems that Trump's Justice Department may be attempting to strike out at people he considers enemies because they sought to understand his and his associates' many ties with Russia. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for many of other Trump opponents to worry whether they'll face questionable criminal investigations, as well. Nor would it be unreasonable for civil servants currently in the government to worry about whether they might face such a scenario in the future.
But no matter what the president believes, federal law enforcement isn’t meant to serve as a vehicle for political retribution. Any attempt to use it as such is at odds with how democracy ought to work. Even if these investigations don't go anywhere, their very existence still tells a political story that Trump is keen to peddle to his base: that all the evidence that his campaign had a lot of troubling ties to a political adversary must be made up — or don't matter. And that anyone who tries to suggest otherwise might be punished.
