Vox: Dear John, Brett and Amy: If Trump can come for James Comey, he can come for you.

Source: Vox

Comey’s indictment is a warning to the Supreme Court justices

Dear John, Brett and Amy: If Trump can come for James Comey, he can come for you.

Ian Millhiser
Fri, September 26, 2025 at 2:55 PM EDT·7 min read

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Setting aside the question of whether Scalia’s argument against recusal was persuasive, his opinion is an accurate description of elite Washington culture. The pool of people who receive high-level presidential appointments is fairly small, and the pool of Republicans who serve in those roles is even smaller. Serving in government means endless meetings, as competing agencies hash out their differences and competing political factions jockey for position. By the time someone rises to the highest offices — a justice or an agency leader — they are likely to be well-acquainted with their peers and friends with many of them.

Which brings us to Trump’s recent decision to bring criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey — charges that are so weak that President Donald Trump had to fire a US attorney and install a loyalist to secure an indictment.

Although Democratic President Barack Obama appointed Comey to lead the FBI, largely because Obama wanted to avoid a difficult confirmation fight with Senate Republicans, Comey was a Republican for most of his career (although he announced that he’d left the party during Trump’s first term). He served as deputy attorney general, the Justice Department’s No. 2 job, under Republican President George W. Bush — and that was after Bush appointed him to a prestigious job as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

In his many political jobs, Comey most likely worked directly with at least two of the sitting justices. His tenure as deputy attorney general overlaps with Justice Neil Gorsuch’s tenure in a senior Justice Department role. And Comey worked on a Senate investigation into the 1990s-era Whitewater scandal at the same time that Justice Brett Kavanaugh worked on independent counsel Ken Starr’s investigation into the same matter.

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Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/news/articles/comey-indictment-warning-supreme-court-185500288.html

Original Vox link (paywall): https://www.vox.com/politics/463022/supreme-court-comey-indictment-trump