Critics who have battled President Donald Trump over the years are bracing for his legal retribution, following former FBI Director James Comey’s Thursday night indictment.
The legal case against Comey appears to face an uphill battle — not least because of Trump’s public statements cheering for the charges. But some of the president’s most prominent critics are anticipating the same treatment, particularly after the president on Friday said he expected more charges were on the way.
“Today it’s James Comey,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a longtime foe of the president, told POLITICO in a statement. “Tomorrow it could be Adam Schiff, Letitia James, me, or anyone else who has dared to not kiss his ring. That’s not how justice works in America. The DOJ should follow facts and law, not Trump’s enemies list. I will not back down or be quiet.”
The charges against Comey came after norm-busting pressure from the president toward the Justice Department. Federal prosecutors Thursday night announced charges against the former FBI director, less than a week after Trump aired his frustrations that prosecutors hadn’t yet acted against Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and California Sen. Adam Schiff, imploring Attorney General Pam Bondi to move faster in a social media post.
In the days that followed that post, the White House forced out the U.S. attorney in charge of the Comey and James investigations. It was his replacement — Lindsey Halligan, a one-time personal attorney to the president with no prosecutorial experience, who came from the White House — who signed the Thursday indictment against the former FBI director.
Trump himself intimated that his Department of Justice is not yet done. On Friday, he suggested that more indictments against “sick, radical left people” will come soon.
“It’s not a list, but I think there will be others,” he told reporters outside the White House, while claiming he was not pressuring the Department of Justice. “I hope there will be others.”
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has threatened and cheered investigations into his critics, including former political allies. In August, federal agents searched the Maryland home of John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser turned harsh critic. “He’s a real sort of a low life,” Trump said of Bolton as news of the search broke, proclaiming he was “not a fan” of the Republican.
Trump also floated investigating former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a onetime ally who briefly ran Trump’s 2016 transition, over the 2013 “Bridgegate” scandal. He also ordered his administration to investigate two former administration officials from his first term who have since become critics in April.
Meanwhile, Schiff, whose clashes with the president include his management of Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020, has formed a legal defense fund amid a probe from the Justice Department into his finances.
“In my almost six years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, I never witnessed such a blatant abuse of the department,” he said of the case against Comey in a Thursday post on X. “The DOJ is now little more than an arm of the president’s retribution campaign.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that it was actually the administration of President Joe Biden that engaged “in lawfare against his political opponents.”
“The indictment against Comey speaks for itself, and the Trump Administration looks forward to fair proceedings in the courts,” Jackson said.
But those who have been critical of the president — and the indictment of Comey — say they won’t be deterred by the president’s pressure campaign.
“Obviously, all of us are concerned, but we can’t operate out of fear,” Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told Crooked Media’s “What a Day” show, recorded shortly before Comey’s indictment was handed down. “That’s what authoritarians want us to do. To be intimidated, to be cowed. And to act in a fearful way.”
One major critic, former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), isn’t sweating an indictment. Kinzinger and Raskin were both preemptively pardoned by Biden in the final hours of his administration for their work on the Jan. 6 investigation, in a bid to shield them from a Trump-fueled prosecution.
Kinzinger estimated that any Department of Justice action would make him “78 times more effective in pushing back against them.”
“My view is, OK, bring it, honestly, because it’s like I obviously I did nothing wrong, so I have nothing to worry about,” Kinzinger, who left Congress in 2023, told CNN on Friday. “In fact, what I did was expose the truth about the insurrection and embarrassed Donald Trump. That’s what happened. He got embarrassed.”