Are Ilhan Omar’s Days In Congress

Patrice’s pre-post text — which the prosecution will likely use to establish premeditation — was only obtained because Comey refused to provide the original photo that contained its metadata. The FBI had to serve Apple with a warrant to retrieve it. That’s the detail that matters: Comey, the former FBI director who built his reputation on investigative integrity, withheld evidence from investigators working on his own case. His own agency had to go around him to get the file.

The irony compounds on itself. Comey pioneered the strategy of using minor process crimes and perjury traps against Trump allies as leverage to apply pressure in the broader Russia probe. Mueller used that same playbook to drag Manafort, Flynn, Stone, Papadopoulos, and Cohen through prosecutorial meat grinders — not for anything connected to Russian collusion, which was never proven, but for peripheral conduct that became criminal only because investigators were looking hard enough.

Now Comey is in the Eastern District of North Carolina with his own set of investigators looking hard at his phones, his metadata, his communications, and the conspiracy investigations that diGenova’s DOJ team has been running into the broader Russiagate operation — an operation that has Comey’s fingerprints all over the Oxferd Comma document, the Steele Dossier laundering, the “defensive briefings” to Republican senators that were designed to poison the Ukraine corruption investigation, and the shadow government that the CIA whistleblower confirmed was running in parallel to the White House.

Should Comey choose to strike a plea deal rather than face North Carolina’s federal correctional facility in Butner, he could become the most consequential witness in the entire conspiracy investigation. That’s the mirror image of how Mueller used Trump’s allies against him. The tools are the same. The targets have changed.

Poetic justice is too light a phrase for what this moment represents. The man who wrote the book on lawfare is now subject to the laws of that book. And it’s about damned time.