Trump Escalates His Retribution Campaign | Who Might Trump Go After Next? | Comey Indictment Is Not Just Payback. It’s a Glimpse of Trump’s Next Attempt to Seize Power, and more

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump and his top aides have spoken of their plans to bring cases against people who give money to anti-Trump causes. There is no known evidence that any organization funded Kirk’s assassin. But there are donors to left-wing causes that Trump wants to defund. In the White House today, the president signed an order to investigate those donors. He cited the liberal donors Reid Hoffman and George Soros as potential targets. In April, Trump ordered an investigation of ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform.
Yes, Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice is a backward-looking expression of hurt feelings. It’s also another step in a forward-looking plot to shred the rule of law in order to pervert the next election and protect his corruption from accountability. 

The Comey Indictment Is an Embarrassment  (Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic)
The Justice Department should never have brought such a shoddy case.
The Justice Department should never have brought such an astoundingly shoddy case. The decision to do so, under intense pressure from the president to harass his old enemy, is an indication of how thoroughly Trump has been able to corrupt the department.
As defendants go, Comey is well positioned. He can’t be fired (Trump already did that). He has excellent lawyers, and his wealth means that he will have no trouble paying his legal bills. He responded to the news with a short video uploaded to social media, saying, “I’m innocent. So let’s have a trial.” This calm defiance—“We will not live on our knees,” he declared—was characteristic of his Boy Scout persona. But it also marked a striking departure from the cowardice displayed by almost every other institution and figure of authority in the face of Trump’s attack on the rule of law.

Trump Doesn’t Care If You Think He’s Corrupt  (William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swift, The Bulwark)
With the indictment of James Comey, Trump drops the fig leaf.
For his part, Comey seems determined to fight. “My heart is broken for the Department of Justice,” he said in a video statement posted to social media last night. “I have great confidence in the federal judicial system and I am innocent, so let’s have a trial, and keep the faith.”
Continued faith in the system is an extraordinary thing for a person to express when they’re in the middle of getting trampled by it. But Comey is right to realize that Trump has not rotted every institution equally. The Justice Department may now serve both as the president’s personal weapon and as his messaging apparatus, but Trump still needs to get this act of retribution past the courts. He’s already been partially stymied: A Virginia grand jury declined to bring an indictment for one of the three charges the Justice Department initially sought.
It might seem a small comfort, given how many other institutions have already bent the knee. (If Trump nominates Lindsey Halligan for the U.S. attorney position she is now filling in an acting capacity, does anyone think the Senate will put up much of a fight?) Still, that’s the genius of the jury system. Trump may have folded up the entire federal government, from Congress to the Justice Department, and put it in his pocket. But he can’t change the fact that Comey will ultimately answer only to a judge and to a jury of his peers.

The Indictment Against Comey Should Be Dismissed  (Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review)
It’s an incomprehensible case.
And Jim Comey has a dilemma.
The vindictive indictment the Trump Justice Department barely managed to get a grand jury to approve on Thursday is so ill-conceived and incompetently drafted, he should be able to get it thrown out on a pretrial motion to dismiss. Legally, he’ll be entitled to that, and it would short-circuit the very expensive and punitive litigation process.
Yet, the case has been randomly assigned to a Biden-appointee in the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge Michael Nachmanoff. If Judge Nachmanoff throws the case out pretrial, President Trump and his supporters will rail that the fix was in.

Donald Trump Is Raising the Stakes for Holding Power  (Economist)
Winning is becoming about prosecution, not just public policy.
Mr. Trump is using his office to punish adversaries in ways that are without precedent. The actions are often alarming in themselves, but what may eventually matter more is that together they are intensifying not just the perceived stakes of politics, which have been climbing for years among hyperpartisans, but the actual importance for officeholders of political authority. The way Mr. Trump uses power, in other words, is raising the real stakes for holding on to power.

Trump’s New Demands on Justice Department Raise Alarm Among Prosecutors  (Jeremy Roebuck and Salvador Rizzo, Washington Post)
The president is rapidly intensifying the pressure he’s putting on federal prosecutors, prompting some observers to question whether their traditional independence can survive.

Justice Dept. Official Pushes Prosecutors to Investigate George Soros’s Foundation  (Devlin Barrett, New York Times)
The directive suggests department leaders are following orders from the president, a major break from decades of past practice meant to insulate the agency from political interference.

Donald Trump Is Trying to Silence His Critics. He Will Fail, But the Country Could Still Lose.(Economist)
It should not need saying in the home of the First Amendment, but a craven press leads inexorably to rampant corruption, poor government and cynical, disaffected voters.