The trumped up criminal indictment of former FBI Director Jim Comey, as expressly ordered by the president, is a legal nullity and hopefully will be dispatched by a federal judge. But the damage is done, as Donald Trump has thoroughly corrupted the Department of Justice.

It is so bad that Trump’s own pick to be the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, honorably and correctly refused to seek grand jury charges against Comey for ostensibly making false statements to Congress and obstructing justice. Trump was livid and ordered Siebert out. Siebert says he resigned. Trump claims he was fired.

But gone was Siebert and replaced by the unfit and unqualified Lindsey Halligan. She presented a case against Comey to a grand jury — personally, as it turned out, because her own prosecutors did not want to do it given the weakness of the case. Halligan’s prior job was as a White House “improper ideology” monitor, a detail that would seem almost too ham-handed had this been a novel.

No, it’s obvious that Comey’s real crime was being a thorn in the side of the administration and a potent voice calling out its weaponization of the justice system, a weaponization that he is now falling prey to himself. We don’t really have to speculate about this; Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to target Comey among other prominent Trump antagonists in what looks like it might have been an attempted direct message on his Truth Social platform, not because he believed them to be legitimately guilty of any crimes, but because he felt that they were sapping at his credibility.

For his part, the former FBI director has reacted exactly how one should when targeted in this manner by Trump’s overbearing administration: he said he was not intimidated and would see them in court. At base level, these efforts are about narrative and intimidation — Trump wants to make his political and civic enemies look guilty and for them to feel afraid of crossing him. What he wants is for people like Comey to shut up and grovel; the last several months of capitulations by institutions big and small have shown very clearly that this only empowers him more.

If Republicans are so concerned about the idea of high-level officials making material misrepresentations to Congress, we have a whole slate of targets where their efforts could be best utilized. There is very little doubt that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. openly lied during his Senate confirmation hearings about his intentions vis-à-vis vaccines, which he has been due to fully trying to turn the nation’s public health infrastructure against after promising explicitly that he would follow the science.

Cabinet secretaries including Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, and Bondi herself, could probably all be credibly probed for lying to Congress. The same goes for several of Trump‘s judicial nominees, up to and including his selections for the Supreme Court, who all indicated to some level that they intended to respect precedent when it came to Roe v. Wade. Of course, we all know that no current U.S. attorney is going to move to investigate, let alone indict, any of these people because the administration does not actually care about lying to Congress. Hell, Trump himself has elevated lying to art form, which he’s utilized to great effect throughout his time in public life.

The truth is, courts and juries have consistently thrown out some of the administration’s sham charges, and they’ll probably toss this effort, too. They want us all to think it’s a done deal, but Trump is weaker than he lets on, even as he continues to damage our country with these authoritarian efforts.

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