Former FBI Director James Comey will make another run Wednesday at getting his criminal case dismissed, with his lawyers looking to convince a judge that the prosecution is vindictive and rooted in President Donald Trump’s hatred of him.
The arguments arrive as the Comey case appears freshly imperiled following a judge’s excoriation of the Justice Department on Monday and as multiple challenges to the indictment may result in its dismissal.
Comey has pleaded not guilty to charges accusing him of making a false statement and obstructing Congress and has denied any wrongdoing. He's contested the legitimacy of the hastily appointed Trump administration prosecutor who filed the case and has said he was singled out for prosecution because of Trump’s personal animus against him, an argument that will be debated Wednesday in federal court in Virginia.
Though vindictive prosecution motions are not often successful, Comey’s lawyers contend that his case should be dismissed and call it the outgrowth of the president’s hunger for retribution against the man who once served as his FBI director. Trump fired Comey from that job in May 2017 as Comey was overseeing an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and the Republican president’s 2016 campaign.
The two men have been publicly at odds ever since, with Trump deriding Comey as “a weak and untruthful slime ball” and calling for his prosecution.
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Trump’s congressional gerrymandering push is getting complicated for the GOP
As President Trump laid it out to reporters this summer, the plan was simple.
Republicans, he said, were “entitled” to five more conservative-leaning U.S. House seats in Texas and additional ones in other red states. The president broke with more than a century of political tradition in directing the GOP to redraw those maps in the middle of the decade to avoid losing control of Congress in next year’s midterms.
Four months later, Trump’s audacious ask looks anything but simple. After a federal court panel struck down Republicans’ new map in Texas on Tuesday, the entire exercise holds the potential to net Democrats more winnable seats in the House instead.
“Trump may have let the genie out of the bottle,” said UCLA law professor Rick Hasen, “but he may not get the wish he’d hoped for.”
▶ Read more about Trump’s redistricting efforts
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers quits OpenAI board after release of Epstein emails
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is resigning from OpenAI’s board of directors, the ChatGPT maker and his office said Wednesday.
His departure comes after the release of emails showing he maintained a friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein long after the financier pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl in 2008.
Summers, who is also the former president of Harvard University, joined the OpenAI board in Nov. 2023, part of an effort to restore stability at the nonprofit and bring back its CEO Sam Altman after its previous board members fired Altman days earlier.
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