adminThe Justice Department’s grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia has handed down an indictment charging former FBI director James Comey with making false statements to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding over his Sept. 30, 2020 Senate testimony. This is not a garden-variety political squabble — federal prosecutors have formally accused a onetime top law-enforcement official of lying under oath, and those are serious allegations that must be answered in court.
The indictment did not materialize in a vacuum. President Trump publicly pressured the Justice Department to act and the filing came after a controversial personnel move putting Lindsey Halligan — recently installed in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Virginia — into the prosecutorial seat handling this matter. Critics on the left are screaming politicization, but accountability for officials who abuse power has been a long time coming.
Anyone who’s watched Trey Gowdy over the years knows he doesn’t suffer sanctimony lightly, and his take on this is exactly what hardworking Americans would expect: Comey has long behaved like a self-appointed arbiter of morality in Washington, always lecturing while avoiding accountability. Gowdy has repeatedly called out Comey’s posture and tone — the man genuinely believes he gets to “write the moral script” for the rest of us, and that arrogance finally met real legal scrutiny.
Let’s be clear: conservatives aren’t celebrating indictments for their own sake. We’re celebrating the principle that nobody in government should be above the law, no matter how flashy their book tours or how sanctimonious their TV appearances. The inspector general’s reports and years of derelictions in handling classified material, leaks, and policy breaches have left many Americans wondering why Comey seemed untouchable — that perception of double standards has corroded trust in institutions.
Still, the left and establishment figures are right to raise alarms about politics entering prosecutorial decisions, and those concerns deserve scrutiny too. Senators and legal scholars have warned the optics are dangerous when a change in U.S. Attorneys and public pressure from the White House precede a high-profile indictment; the rule of law is only strengthened when the process is transparent and fair, not when it looks like score settling. The case will test whether accountability can be carried out without turning the DOJ into a political cudgel.
What comes next is straightforward: Comey has been summoned for arraignment on October 9 in Alexandria, and the courts will now take the facts where they lead — motions, discovery, and, if necessary, a trial where both evidence and law will be tested in public. Conservatives should insist on two things: that prosecutors show the evidence plainly, and that the judiciary remain an independent check on politics. If the charges are proved, no one should dodge consequences; if not, the nation must see why the indictment was pursued.
