James Comey has done some things in his career that I didn’t care for and which I suspect you didn’t like either, for what I’m guessing are similar reasons. But those things are irrelevant today. As of Thursday evening, Comey is one more symbol of Donald Trump’s utter contempt for law and decency. To the extent that the United States of America was founded as a nation where the law was more powerful than any individual leader, the sinister indictment of Comey is the ultimate symbol—so far, that is—of Trump’s contempt for the United States of America.

Yes—contempt for the United States of America. This may confuse some Americans, who see Trump constantly wrapping himself in the flag, on some obscene occasions even hugging and kissing it—a Judas kiss from a man who has no understanding of what love of country actually means—and think of him as patriotic. But this is exactly what authoritarian thugs throughout history do. They bathe themselves in flag imagery as they torch the best values that flag represents.

Trump has done many terrible things, has attempted in many ways to place himself above the law. But the Comey indictment is clearly the most egregious. The New York Times, which I’ve criticized in the past for dancing around saying what really needs to be said about Trump in its news columns, actually rose to the occasion this morning in its news analysis piece: “An inexperienced prosecutor loyal to President Trump, in the job for less than a week, filed criminal charges against one of her boss’s most-reviled opponents. She did so not only at Mr. Trump’s direct command, but also against the urging of both her own subordinates and her predecessor, who had just been fired for raising concerns that there was insufficient evidence to indict.”

That inexperienced attorney, whose name you need to commit to memory because it will live in infamy in this country’s history, is Lindsey Halligan. She has never been a prosecutor. She was an insurance lawyer in Florida. She chased tornadoes. And it almost goes without saying that she represented insurance companies against ordinary people. Trump somehow spotted her one day when he was golfing and she was playing tennis (and, oh, she’s a former Miss Colorado), and he invited her onto his legal team.

MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian, who with his colleague Carol Leonnig has been doing the best reporting on all this, said on Morning Joe Friday morning that she presented the case to the grand jury herself. None of the line prosecutors in an office of more than 100 attorneys would even join her. Yes, it must be admitted: She did get these citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia to bring these two charges (she failed to convince them of a third charge whose contents aren’t yet known). But the fact that no career prosecutor would join her speaks to the flimsiness of the case.

Let’s talk about the charges. As you’ve no doubt read, they are based on testimony Comey gave to a Senate committee in September 2020. It was pandemic time, and so he testified from his home in Virginia, which is why the charges were filed there and not in Washington. Ted Cruz asked Comey if he authorized then–Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to leak certain facts to Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett (now covering this matter for the Times) back in 2016 pertaining to the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton. Comey said he did not.

Now you might be saying, “Well, that sounds like something we should get to the bottom of, actually.” That’s the thing. We already have. This has all been investigated. The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, or OIG, investigated the matter and issued a report in 2018. I’m going to get down into some weeds here in these next three paragraphs, but these details are important, bear with me.

To the extent that any upcoming trial might hinge on the question of Comey’s word versus McCabe’s, the inspector general’s report’s findings do not bode well for the neophyte prosecutor. The report found that McCabe “lacked candor” on four separate matters: in a conversation with Comey (see below) and on three separate occasions when he was being interviewed—under oath—by the inspector general’s office.

Now let’s go to the OIG report and scroll down to page 22, where the report discusses its conclusions about a crucial conversation between Comey and McCabe “on or around” October 31, 2016. The subject arose during that conversation of whether McCabe had provided information to the Journal for an article that appeared the day before, headlined “FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe.”

The question at issue, then and today, is whether McCabe had informed his boss—whether Comey knew of the leak, because he later told Ted Cruz at that hearing that he did not. McCabe told the inspector general that he said at the meeting that he had authorized the leak, but he never said he told Comey. Comey told the inspector general that McCabe “definitely” had not told him. The report then states: “While the only direct evidence regarding this McCabe-Comey conversation [was] the recollections of the two participants, there is considerable circumstantial evidence, and we concluded that the overwhelming weight of that evidence supported Comey’s version of the conversation. Indeed, none of the circumstantial evidence provided support for McCabe’s account of the discussion; rather, we found that much of the available evidence undercut McCabe’s claim.”

Maybe that’s why none of the career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia followed their new boss down the road of endorsing this indictment.

But none of that matters to Trump. All he knows is that Comey was investigating his Russia ties, and now, nearly a decade later, Comey must be destroyed. Trump’s vile hyperbole about Comey—a “bad person,” a “sick guy,” and worse—lays bare that this is nothing more than a personal witch hunt. That’s the other thing about authoritarian thugs, besides the faux patriotism: They accuse their opponents of doing exactly what they are perpetrating. It has a name: accusation in a mirror—accuse your political foes of doing exactly that which you yourself are doing or plan to do. The Nazis used to say that the Jews were planning on wiping out the German people.

Trump, far from being the victim of witch hunts, is the orchestrator of them. But even he has never sunk this low. This is a crime against the best values of this republic. It is a profoundly un-American act. And so far, the entire Republican Party, and the vast propaganda network that gets to call itself “the press” and enjoy the protections of the First Amendment, are complicit.

This is just the beginning. Trumped-up indictments of Adam Schiff and Letitia James are presumably coming. And then George Soros, for funding “terrorism.” Who’s next? Who knows. To Trump, all these people hate America. But the one who actually hates America is the man who is so ignorant and dismissive of its highest principles that he thinks he’s entitled to use the justice system to destroy people he doesn’t like. And history will remember who that is.

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Last week’s quiz: “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” A quiz on the history of American late-night television.

1. The first American late-night talk show, interestingly, was hosted by a woman: actress Faye Emerson. She was quite political and had been married to a member of a very prominent political family. Who was her ex-husband?

A. Elliott Roosevelt (FDR’s son)

B. Francis Kennedy (Joe’s brother)

C. Edgar Eisenhower (Dwight’s brother)

D. Declan McCarthy (Joe’s brother)

Answer: A, Elliott Roosevelt. Emerson was an interesting woman. Her Louisiana parents shipped her off to a convent—where she became interested in acting! The Roosevelt union sounds like it was not a happy one.

2. The Tonight Show debuted in 1954. Who was its first host?

A. Jack Paar

B. Art Linkletter

C. Steve Allen

D. Ernie Kovacs

Answer: C, Steve Allen. I know. Too easy. I do that once in a while.

3. The Tonight Show theme song during the Johnny Carson era (“Johnny’s Theme”) became universally recognizable and famous. Who wrote it? 

A. Doc Severinsen

B. Al Hirt

C. Herb Alpert

D. Paul Anka

Answer: D, Paul Anka. He wrote it in 1959 under the name “Toot Sweet.” Here’s what that version sounded like, before Doc and the boys got hold of it.

4. John Lennon and Paul McCartney made a much-anticipated appearance on The Tonight Show in 1968 to announce the formation of Apple Records. They learned at the last minute that Johnny Carson wasn’t hosting. Who, to their annoyance, was the improbable guest host that night?

A. Robert Goulet

B. Wilt Chamberlain

C. Phyllis Diller

D. Joe Garagiola

Answer: D, Joe Garagiola. Here’s a firsthand write-up by someone. Sounds pretty grim for all concerned. Here’s a combination of sound and scratchy video that tries to piece the evening together.

5. Who was the first African American late-night host, and what year did the show debut?

A. Steve Harvey, 1994

B. Arsenio Hall, 1989

C. Armstrong Williams, 1990

D. Diahann Carroll, 1977

Answer: Arsenio, of course. Remember when candidate Bill Clinton played the sax on the show in 1992? It was the first of those “personal” candidate late-night moments. And he was pretty good!

6. On a Reddit thread from three years ago, what was the all-time favorite David Letterman Stupid Pet Trick?

A. Duck eating cottage cheese out of woman’s mouth

B. Dog flipping biscuit to another dog

C. Horse drinking from a baby bottle

D. Dog jumping rope with two young sisters

Answer: D, dog jumping rope. Here’s the video. I found the duck one far more interesting myself, but maybe some people found it kinda gross. 

This week’s quiz: The shock of the new. A quiz on art from 1900 to 1910, cuz I just think it’s time for something a little high-minded.

1. Paul Cézanne painted this mountain many times, over many years. In the 1890s, the renderings were representational and literal; starting in the early 1900s, they grew more and more abstract until his 1906 death.

A. Mont Saint-Michel

B. Mont Blanc

C. Mont Sainte-Victoire

D. Pointe Percée

2. Henri Matisse is the most famous artist of the fauvist movement, given its name by a critic who visited a 1905 group show and, after contemplating their aggressive use of color, dubbed the artists “fauves,” which means:

A. Mad-hatters

B. Wild beasts

C. Harlots

D. Subversives

3. In 1900, he was painting “normal” paintings like Landscape at Arnhem, which is just what it sounds like. These were a far cry from the later, aggressively abstract style for which he is far better known, a style so ubiquitous that it found its way to kitchen linoleum patterns and shampoo bottles.

A. Piet Mondrian

B. Stuart Davis

C. Wassily Kandinsky

D. Paul Klee

4. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is arguably the most famous modern artwork of all time. In this 1907 work, Pablo Picasso portrayed five prostitutes—but they were not from Avignon. In what city did his real-life subjects live?

A. Madrid

B. Barcelona

C. Paris

D. Marseilles

5. Cubism was probably the most famous artistic school that began in the early 1900s. Picasso, of course, was its leader. Who was the second-best-known Cubist painter?

A. Juan Gris

B. Edvard Munch

C. Henri Rousseau

D. Georges Braque

6. Besides abstraction, another hallmark of art of this period was that it showed the gritty rough-and-tumble of proletarian life. One famous work along these lines, by George Bellows in 1909, gave us a graphic depiction of what?

A. A cockfight, with men wildly cheering

B. A longshoreman cutting another man’s throat

C. An alcohol-fueled sexual assault

D. A boxing match

Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com. 

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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