“We will not live on our knees”

These words, uttered by former FBI Director James Comey last month in response to a baseless criminal indictment, simultaneously sent a chill down my spine — and stiffened it. Comey, with these words, defies our president — a petty, vindictive autocrat determined to exact revenge on those he perceives as political enemies — and calls on all citizens to resist his abuses of power and office.

(Why does President Trump view Comey — someone who probably helped his 2016 campaign — as an enemy? This article summarizes the history of the relationship.)

It doesn’t take a highly trained lawyer to see that this indictment — for making allegedly false statements to Congress — is, to use legal terminology, a pile of horseshit. The case was brought purely for vindictive reasons, as has been amply documented in the news media. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA), led by an experienced interim U.S. attorney only recently appointed by Donald Trump himself, examined the evidence and reportedly determined that there was no probable cause to indict Comey. The President was outraged by this impartial and entirely proper application of the law by experienced, unbiased professionals, and in a social media post that was intended to be private but was accidentally posted by the president, he hectored Attorney General Pam Bondi to intervene.

The president’s post on the Orwellian-named Truth Social platform must be read in all its glory to be appreciated for its sixth-grade syntax and megalomaniacal viewpoints, and should go down as one of the lowest moments for the U.S. presidency in our nation’s history.

As the post indicates, the president fired the interim U.S. Attorney because he failed to do his bidding and so the president simply appointed a junior lawyer with no criminal prosecutorial experience as the second interim U.S. Attorney in that district. Her sole “qualification” was that she would reliably do whatever the president expected. It surprised no one, then, when she overruled the professional prosecutorial staff of the EDVA prosecutor’s office and brought this indictment, exactly as the president demanded.

No person is safe in this country if the president can cycle through prosecutors until he finds a toady willing to bring the charges he seeks. And in late-breaking news, the same U.S. Attorney’s Office has now charged Letitia James, the New York Attorney General who brought a successful civil case in New York state court against President Trump and his family companies, with a laughable mortgage fraud case. If our justice system tolerates this kind of abuse, we are in deep, deep trouble.

I am grateful that former Director Comey is fighting these charges, and there is a strong possibility that the federal district court judge will dismiss the case as a vindictive prosecution, as Comey’s lawyer, former Chicago-based U.S. Attorney Pat Fitzgerald, has indicated he will argue.

(More reading on the dire implications of this: see The Atlantic and The New Yorker.)

Unfortunately, the list of the powerful political, business, and civic institutions that have bent the knee to President Trump is long. At the top of the list are the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, which have the institutional responsibility to oversee the Executive Branch and check abuses of power, but instead have rubber-stamped or acquiesced in the face of clearly illegal conduct by the Executive Branch.

Powerful corporations, instead of using their power to litigate frivolous lawsuits brought by the president, have settled for millions of dollars, including ABC/Disney ($16 million), CBS/Paramount ($16 million), Facebook/Meta ($25 million), and YouTube/Google ($24.5 million).

Some of the country’s largest and most prestigious law firms have caved to pressure and threats from the president, entering into “settlements” to perform tens of millions of dollars of pro-bono work for this administration (as I have written about previously): A&O Shearman ($125 million); Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft ($100 million); Kirkland & Ellis ($125 million); Latham & Watkins ($125 million); Milbank ($100 million); Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison ($40 million); Simpson Thacher & Bartlett ($125 million); Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom ($100 million); Willkie Farr & Gallagher ($100 million).

Finally, some of the nation’s most prestigious private universities have entered into settlements under pressure from this administration: Brown ($50 million), Columbia ($200 million ), and the University of Pennsylvania (settlement without financial payment).

These institutions had the means to stand their ground, and if they had done so — individually but with coordination — they could have mounted very effective resistance. Instead, each of these institutions cut a deal, and every capitulation emboldened this administration and encouraged the next abuse of power — and the next one, and the one after that. These institutions, which are the products of our free and law-based society and are supposed to be the bulwarks of that society, have let us down. When we come out the other side of this, the failures of all these institutions must be reckoned with.

The scale of the abuse of power we are witnessing from this administration is without precedent, and every one of us needs to recognize this and speak up, in our personal lives and our professional lives. I am a mild-mannered person by disposition, but my hair is on fire.

As I have said before, I understand that talking about “political issues” in a professional setting is often discouraged, but I see the current situation differently. Believing in our Constitution, in the faithful execution of the law, and in the proper functioning of our system of government are not “political positions” about which reasonable people can disagree. The fundamentals of our law-based system are not up for debate. These are what every child learns in school, and what we are all supposed to support. Now, maybe someone reading this sees the facts on the ground differently, and we can discuss that — but I am not going to stay silent when I see the law being systematically violated and people’s rights trampled. I’m a lawyer; the law is what I am trained to do.

So I am going to say what I have to say. And if someone wants to tell me I am overreacting, I would be happy to hear from you. Truly. We can discuss these politicized prosecutions and why you think I shouldn’t be worried about them. We can discuss the deployment of ICE and the National Guard to our cities, the violence being perpetrated by them, and the summary detentions of mostly brown and Black people, including U.S. citizens and veterans — and why you think I shouldn’t be worried about them. We can discuss the president’s usurpation of Congress’s tariff authority in order to benefit his allies and promote his political agenda, and why you think I shouldn’t be worried about that. We can discuss the president’s pardons of the more than 1,500 rioters and insurrectionists, who were found guilty or pled guilty to crimes (many violent) committed on January 6, 2021, and why you think I shouldn’t be worried about them. I doubt you will reassure me. But you are welcome to try, and I will listen.

But I will not live on my knees, and neither should you. Thank you, James Comey.

Categorised as: Current events, News and Views