Jim Comey
Screenshot of Trump’s post on Truth Social
I looked through some comments about Jim Comey being indicted by a federal grand jury in Virginia.¹
The first thing I find striking is that almost all the commenters seem to have forgotten that Comey was actually a Republican. Many people on the left still blame him for reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as Secretary of State just eleven days before the election. An action that may well have cost her the presidency. Yet the commenters now speak as if Comey has always been part of the radical left and consistently acted against Trump.
The second point is that most, perhaps all, of the commenters seem genuinely convinced that Comey broke the law simply by doing his job. They do question the indictment a little, noting that it focuses on relatively minor charges (one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction based on later public testimony). But in their minds, Comey is guilty of something closer to treason, so they need to rationalize the gap between that belief and the relatively narrow charges. This creates a kind of mental tension: on the one hand, Trump currently wields the full power of the state to uncover the truth, yet on the other, they cling to the idea that the state is somehow shielding Comey.
The third point is that the commenters seem completely unaware that Erik Siebert was appointed by Trump himself. Because Siebert did not find sufficient evidence to indict Letitia James, and was later replaced by Trump for that very reason, they simply assume he must have been acting in bad faith.