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.
by Ian Millhiser, Sep 26, 2025, 11:55 AM PDT
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
About two decades ago, Justice Antonin Scalia went on a duck hunting trip with then-Vice President Dick Cheney. This trip became an issue because the Supreme Court was considering a case challenging some of Cheney’s official actions within the Bush administration, and a party to that case asked Scalia to recuse because of his personal relationship with the vice president.
In his opinion denying this request, Scalia argued that requiring justices to “remove themselves from cases in which the official actions of friends were at issue would be utterly disabling.” Many of the justices, Scalia explained, “reached this Court precisely because they were friends of the incumbent President or other senior officials,” and his opinion described several past examples of close relationships between justices and presidents or other top members of the executive branch.
SCOTUS, Explained
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.
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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.
Meanwhile, for the reasons Scalia laid out in his recusal opinion, most of the justices undoubtedly know Comey. He was a top official in two presidential administrations, and one of the preeminent Republican lawyers in Washington, DC. Comey is cut from the exact same cloth as each of the Republican justices.
So I hope these similarities are on these justices’ minds as they consider whether to rein in Trump’s growing attempts to weaponize the Justice Department against his political foes. Trump isn’t just targeting Democrats, and he isn’t just targeting people from very different backgrounds than the justices themselves. Trump is now targeting people exactly like the Republican justices. And if they don’t stop behaving as sycophants for this administration and take steps to restrain Trump now, the justices themselves could be next.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
See also: The overwhelming evidence that the Supreme Court is on Donald Trump’s team
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Comey’s indictment is a warning: Even Trump’s enablers aren’t safe | Vox
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