Round-up: Comey indictment. Emergency gathering of generals. U.S. assesses threats no more.

Analysis of the week's events

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The Comey indictment

This week, Donald Trump ordered the indictment of former FBI director James Comey, one of his most long-running antagonists. Trump hates Comey because of his role in clearing Hillary Clinton of charges over the email scandal in 2016, even though Comey’s handling of that case probably cost Clinton the election anyway. And he hates him because after Trump took office the first time around, Comey refused to go along with his attempts to politicize the FBI.

Why now? The reason is simple. The “crimes” for which Trump has charged Comey - allegedly lying to Congress - are subject to a statute of limitations, meaning that after next week they could not be charged.

And why has it taken so long? Again, the reason is simple. Every professional prosecutor in the Department of Justice who has looked into the matter has said that there is no case to answer. Under the normal administration of the rule of law, this case would never have been brought.

That’s why Trump had to fire Erik Sieber, the attorney overseeing the investigation, and replace him with his former personal lawyer, Lindsey Halligan. Halligan is trained in insurance law, has no prosecutorial experience, and her most recent job was as a White House staffer rooting out “woke” exhibits at federally-funded museums. But for Trump, there is only one part of her resumé that matters - she will unquestioningly follow orders.

Just as with the deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles earlier this year, this all has the feeling of a Rubicon being crossed. The president is not supposed to decide who to prosecute, to pick and choose attorneys to do his bidding, or to treat the Department of Justice like an extension of his political operation. This ought to be the biggest scandal in U.S. law enforcement in decades. It’s certainly bigger than Watergate. But instead we hear crickets from Republicans in Congress.

What makes this even more notable is that this is James Comey, not the leader of the Berkeley chapter of antifa. Comey was until recently a pillar of the Republican establishment, a died-in-the-wool law-and-order type who spent decades of his life prosecuting criminals and terrorists before going to work at defense contractor Lockheed Martin. He fell out of favor because in Trumpworld, the only thing that matters is loyalty. But if they can come for him, they can come for anybody - Republicans included.

What happens next will be a major test of the criminal justice system. All that has happened so far is that he has been indicted by a grand jury, a gathering of citizens randomly selected to decide if there is enough evidence for a case to proceed.

Indictment rates at grand juries run at over 99% because grand juries only hear from the prosecutor’s side of the case, and the bar for proceeding is so low. It means effectively nothing about the likely outcome of the case. And in this case, the grand jury actually rejected one of the three charges the regime wanted to bring - an unusual sign of pushback which says something about the weakness of the case.

But now this case goes to real judges and real lawyers. The chance of the Trump regime securing a conviction seems vanishingly low. In fact, it might never even come to trial in the first place.

The indictment against Comey is laughably short on details, and the events that proceeded it are clear evidence of politically biased and selective prosecution. No career prosecutor was willing to sign their name to it. Judges have the power to throw out cases if the evidence is too thin or prosecutors violated the rights of a defendant, and both stipulations could apply here.

But it matters how the courts deal with this. For most of Trump’s second term, the courts have given the regime what is called the “presumption of regular order” - the benefit of the doubt that the regime’s lawyers are actually honestly and without bias, even when it has been pretty obvious that they are not.

But this selective, politically-motivated prosecution is the clearest sign of corruption at the heart of Trump’s Department of Justice yet. It needs to be tossed out with extreme prejudice and in a way that is maximally embarrassing for the regime and its hand-picked servants. If it isn’t, then more prosecutions like this will surely be coming.

Bizarre gathering of generals

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth raised a lot of eyebrows last week when he ordered every single U.S. general and admiral in the world to gather in Virginia next week for an unprecedented meeting.

Was he going to fire twenty percent of them, as he has previously vowed to do? Is there a global military emergency? What could possibly require gathering all of the military’s top brass in one place, creating an enormous security risk and distracting them from their jobs?

The answer apparently is that he wants to make a speech on the “warrior ethos”. Cue eye rolls in every time zone.

This is the latest expression of what I’ve previously described as “Military MAGA”, a distinct MAGA worldview which has taken a foothold in the military and veteran community.

Drawing on the anti-elite populism of mainstream MAGA, Military MAGA views generals and admirals as woke elitists who are too busy worrying about diversity and gender quotas to win any wars. The answer, they claim, is to put in charge “warriors” who are laser focused on “lethality”.

Oh, and they’re also very concerned about military grooming standards, which Hegseth also reportedly plans to discuss.

Many flag officers spent significant time in combat earlier in their careers, and the idea that they need a lecture on “lethality” or grooming from a former Fox News host who never rose above the rank of major is likely to rankle.

But from the perspective of Military MAGA, you can see the appeal of a gathering like this - calling the generals and admirals to heel is a way of subtly disrespecting and degrading them. Watch out, Hegseth, seems to be saying - if I can make you drop everything and fly here to hear this speech, then I can also fire you, so you’d better stay loyal.

It’s all a ridiculous distraction from the real work that the military needs to be doing. But that’s what happens when you put culture warriors in charge of the Pentagon.

U.S. threat assessment gone

Every four years, the U.S. intelligence community has produced a report called Global Trends which tries to forecast long-term developments which might have consequences for U.S. security. Previous editions have forecast pandemics, climate change, and Russia’s increased alignment with China. A new edition was due to come out this year - but now it won’t.

The report has been cancelled by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who apparently finds its contents inconvenient. That’s because the contents of the report would likely contradict some of the Trump regime’s key national security policies. It might say, for instance, that climate change is real, or that Vladimir Putin has malign intentions towards the United States and is taking Trump for a ride.

This is just the latest example of a political purge affecting the intelligence and military communities.