Trump Is Continuing to Weaponize the Justice System Against James Comey for Investigating Russian Election Interference

Donald Trump has suffered repeated setbacks in his attempts to gin up bogus federal prosecutions of his political enemies—but he keeps trying. Most recently, he has used the same sympathetic judge who bogged down Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of him, who is now supervising a grand jury tasked with churning out indictments of Trump’s enemies.

Axios has the story:

Former FBI Director James Comey has been subpoenaed in the wide-ranging “grand conspiracy” case against the ex-officials who investigated and prosecuted President Trump, two sources with knowledge of the situation tell Axios. …

The Trump administration’s grand conspiracy theory posits that Democratic officials bent the rules, broke the law, and lied under oath to investigate, prosecute, and otherwise undermine Trump from his election in 2016 through his federal indictments in 2023.

The Comey subpoena, issued last week, relates to his alleged role in the drafting of a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concerning Russia’s election interference that favored Trump. …

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump nominee who threw out the federal prosecution against him in his classified documents case in 2024, impaneled the grand jury in the Southern District of Florida.

The main corrupt motive here is simply for Trump to seek revenge against his political enemies. The deeper corrupt motive is to criminalize the process of drafting Intelligence Community Assessments whose results the president does not like, making it impossible for career officials in the administration to do their jobs without political interference.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.