Trump’s Legal Overreach Against Comey and Media Backfires as Indictments Collapse

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 30 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump’s corrupt use of state power to persecute his enemies is dramatically ramping up. The Justice Department just indicted former FBI Director James Comey on laughably thin charges. And the Federal Communications Commission chief is escalating his war against ABC due to Trump’s rage at Jimmy Kimmel. These are heinous abuses of power, but we also think they’re likely to backfire on Trump in a major way. If and when they fizzle, the result will be that they don’t even energize the MAGA base for the midterms, and if anything, will likely drive votes against the GOP.

We’re digging through all this today with former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, author of a new book, The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government, which is certainly an apt title given these latest developments.

Barbara McQuade:

Thanks, Greg. Great to be here. You know, when I first came up with that title, like a year and a half ago, it felt very novel and now it feels very obvious.

Sargent: It’s perfect. You were prescient there. Well done. So let’s start with James Comey. Trump’s effort to prosecute him the first time failed. Now they’re starting again. James Comey has been indicted for an image he put on Instagram last spring showing seashells arranged to depict the numbers 86-47. Barb, can you walk us through what prosecutors are trying to do here and why it’s such a joke?

McQuade:

Yeah, it’s hard to get into the head of what’s happening at DOJ right now because it’s so far afield from what I saw in my 20 years as a federal prosecutor. We saw the effort to convict James Comey of a crime in the fall fizzle. And so now here we are with this charge based on events that occurred almost a year ago. If this were really such a serious charge, you know, what on earth could explain an almost year-long delay? I know Todd Blanche and Kash Patel said that they’ve been investigating the case, but my gosh, they had the post in May and they interviewed Comey the next day. I don’t know what more is necessary. Go out to sea and find the actual seashells? I don’t think so.

And so, this statute is something I’ve charged. Threatening to kill a president is a serious crime and people do get charged with it from time to time. The essence of the charge is it has to be what’s called a true threat. It’s not enough to say, I don’t like the president or even to say the president should die. You have to express a true threat. And what the court has said, as recently as 2023 in a case called