When we defend what we already believe to be wrong, we eventually lose the vocabulary to even say what it means to be wrong.

The prosecution of Jim Comey is political — unavoidably so. That alone doesn’t make it bad; political cases have always been with us, and Comey has been at the center of decisions to bring them (or not bring them) many times. Comey is a political figure under fire for political statements, so not prosecuting him would also have been political.

But in thinking through whether a criminal charge is justified, there are really two distinct questions: whether the process was followed properly, and whether the charge itself is justified. Those are often related inquiries — a corrupt or vindictive process is more likely to produce bad charging decisions — but showing a problem on one end doesn’t necessarily show the other. A crooked or malicious prosecutor may still charge the guilty; an independent and honest but overzealous prosecutor who has lost all perspective may still bring charges that have no place in court.

There is really no doubt that the process was corrupted here. The Justice Department always answers to the president, but when the president is meddling directly in particular charging decisions and firing people who won’t bring charges against his political foes, that’s a very bad sign. It’s a much worse thing here: Trump has been openly calling for retribution going back to the campaign, and Trump isn’t a lawyer and obviously doesn’t much care what his enemies are indicted for — the textbook case of “picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.” That is clearer when you consider that Comey wasn’t indicted for any of the things he did to Trump, but for statements to Congress in a leak investigation dating back to the 2016 Hillary Clinton investigation, the mishandling of which by Comey probably helped Trump win the 2016 election. (Imagine going back to 1999 with word that, 26 years later, the top news story of the day would be a perjury prosecution arising out of a Clinton investigation. Somewhere, Bill Murray awakens to the strains of “I Got You, Babe.”)

What’s even more perverse, if you are looking at this solely through the lens of Trumpian payback, is that this case arises from a leak by Andrew McCabe, in which McCabe and Comey gave conflicting or at least inconsistent testimony about whether it was authorized by Comey. McCabe, however, was a much more egregious wrongdoer in the Russiagate scandal, and one would think that a prosecution that is brought to settle scores for the abuse of the law against Trump would put McCabe in its sights — and certainly would not premise a criminal charge upon selling a jury on McCabe’s credibility. Good luck with that.

But are the charges bad? We should apply the same standard we used to judge the charges against Trump, and against political figures before him: There should be a clear and unambiguous crime, not one that requires creative interpretations of the law; it should be grounded in the sort of evidence that would normally support such a charge; and it should be a kind of case that is customarily charged. This indictment goes one for three.

The lead charge against Comey is lying to Congress. (There’s also an obstruction charge, but it is essentially based on the perjury charge). Perjury is a straightforward crime; everybody knows it is wrong and illegal and has been for a long time. Certainly, a lawyer who ran the FBI, trumpeted the Martha Stewart prosecution, and often signed off on false-statement and process charges knows that. The indictment recites a statement by Comey to Congress that is alleged to be false. None of this requires inventive lawyering of the sort that pervaded the legal theories of Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith.

Things go downhill from there, however. A major reason why perjury is often suspected but rarely charged is that a lot of cases of potential perjury involve ambiguous questions or weasel-worded answers. As the Supreme Court explained in Bronston v. United States (1973), “Precise questioning is imperative as a predicate for the offense of perjury” because “the perjury statute is not to be loosely construed, nor the statute invoked simply because a wily witness succeeds in derailing the questioner — so long as the witness speaks the literal truth. The burden is on the questioner to pin the witness down to the specific object of the questioner’s inquiry.” It’s not perjury to give “intentionally misleading responses with an especially strong tendency to mislead the questioner,” and it’s not a crime to give answers that “were shrewdly calculated to evade.” Comey was charged under a different statute than the one construed in Bronston, but it still applies only to a defendant who “makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation,” so courts are apt to apply the same rigor. As Andy McCarthy details, the questioning of Comey by Ted Cruz in 2020 in the leak investigation at issue was far from precise, and while Comey’s answers seem to reflect an intent to mislead Congress, it’s not the sort of clear-cut record that would normally support a prosecution for perjury.

The problem doesn’t stop with the evidence. This is, at bottom, a prosecution for leaking. It’s historically been uncommon to prosecute media leaks, especially those that just paint government officials and agencies in an unflattering light rather than those that disclose secrets, and especially when leaking is carried out by senior political appointees. It’s true that the pace of leak-related prosecutions expanded sharply during the Obama administration, that this trend was carried forward during the first Trump term, and that even protections put in place by Merrick Garland to pump the brakes on leak investigations were widely flouted. But the setting of this prosecution is hardly an area in which one would expect to see criminal charges.

It’s easy to see why Trump partisans are instinctively rallying around the Comey prosecution. It is inarguably the case that the law was abused to investigate and prosecute Trump and his aides and supporters over the past eight years. And it’s galling to hear the defenders and initiators of that lawfare now acting shocked, shocked to discover that similar tactics could be turned against them. “There are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” Comey intoned. No, that’s wrong: You’re not the little man standing in front of the row of tanks waving a flag. You’re being targeted for what you did when you had power over him.

But those things were wrong then, and they are still wrong. And the thought process behind them — these people are so dangerous, we must stop them by any means necessary — is precisely the same thinking that warped the law in the hands of Bragg, Smith, McCabe, and Fani Willis. When we defend what we already believe to be wrong, we eventually lose the vocabulary to even say what it means to be wrong.