Harry Litman - "Seashellgate" is Going Exactly Nowhere

When the first James Comey indictment dropped last September, I called it the single most shameful act in the Department of Justice’s history. My singular outrage led me to devote five consecutive Substacks that week to cataloguing the wreckage: the legal infirmities, the procedural malpractice, and the naked political origins.

That case duly crashed and burned, dismissed as a legal nullity after a series of courtroom debacles that would have been farcical if the stakes hadn’t been so grave. Rather than accept the rebuke, the DOJ has doubled down with a bespoke indictment, custom-built for one defendant and one audience.

Even as that failed indictment remains technically on appeal, the DOJ now has brought a second indictment of the former FBI director in a different district on an entirely different theory. The charge, if anything, is even more bankrupt and tawdry than the first.

Of course, the filing does not come as the same sort of surprise this time. In his less than 4 weeks as Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche has quickly reached new lows of lawlessness and shameless servility to the president. It was entirely predictable that he was out front at the press conference preening about the latest charges against one of Trump’s most avowed enemies.

https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/seashellgate-is-going-exactly-nowhere