Thursday’s charges against James Comey follow a tumultuous week that echoed Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, amid the heart of Watergate in 1973.

This time, the federal attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert resigned after refusing to bring politically motivated charges against Donald Trump’s enemies, so the president railed to his attorney general, Pam Bondi, in a social media post about inaction against Mr. Comey. A shockingly inexperienced interim U.S. attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was appointed and Mr. Comey indicted. Mr. Trump declared in another post that we got “JUSTICE IN AMERICA!”

We have seen much debate over the merits and timing of a legal case against Mr. Comey, but any such discussion misses the most important point: We don’t want to live in a country where the president of the United States dictates, publicly or privately, who should be targeted by federal prosecutors and then pressures any prosecutor unwilling to bring said politically motivated charges. The Justice Department and the attorney general are supposed to keep an arm’s length distance from the president, not be his personal score settlers.

The fact that it’s possible to predict the next charges to come — presidential rantings indicate that it could be John Bolton, Letitia James or Adam Schiff — shows how corrupted this usually independent process has become.

I have been critical of Mr. Comey for years. I believe as director he did grave damage to the reputation of the F.B.I. and that he bears no small responsibility for the election of Mr. Trump in 2016. In the years since his infamous news conference exonerating and excoriating Hillary Clinton and his subsequent firing by Mr. Trump after he refused to drop the F.B.I. investigation of the former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, Mr. Comey has managed to alienate nearly everyone on the left and the right.

But over many years Mr. Comey served his country, and in however flawed a way, he put his efforts at the service of institutions — the F.B.I., the Justice Department — built and sustained to serve the American people, not the president’s whims.