Legal experts say indictment is test of justice

Trump's targeting of Comey and other perceived foes upends the system, some say.

- BY MICHAEL WILNER

PRESIDENT Trump greets James Comey, then director of the FBI, in early 2017.

ANDREW HARRER Bloomberg

On a Phoenix tarmac in 2016, former President Clinton and U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch had a serendipitous meeting on a private jet. The exchange caused a political firestorm. At a time when the Justice Department was investigating Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president, the appearance of impropriety prompted a national scandal.

"Lynch made law enforcement decisions for political purposes," Donald Trump, her Republican rival that year, would later write of the meeting on Twitter. "Totally illegal!"

It was the beginning of a pattern from Trump claiming political interference by Democrats and career public servants in Justice Department matters, regardless of the evidence.

Now, Trump's years-long claim that it was his opponents who politicized the justice system has become the basis for the most aggressive spree of political prosecutions in modern American history.

"What Trump is doing now with the U.S. attorneys is really in complete opposition to how the people who created those offices imagined what those officials would do — the Founders simply did not envision the office in this way," said Peter Kastor, chair of the history department at Washington University in St. Louis.

"From the inception of the Justice Department," he added, "one of the most remarkable things is how it was never used in this way."

On Thursday, at Trump's express direction, federal charges were filed against James Comey, the former FBI director, alleging he gave false testimony before Congress and attempted to obstruct a congressional proceeding five years ago.