In the matter of James Brien Comey Jr., how finds the court? I do not mean a court of law. I mean the tribunal of history.

Granted, we will be hearing from a Virginia court of law about JBC quite soon. On Thursday, Comey became the first former FBI director in history to be indicted by a grand jury for a felony. The charges? Lying to Congress and obstructing justice. (For the legal eagles among you, the statutes in question are USC 18 §1001 and USC 18 §1505.)

Call it karma, irony, or just good old-fashioned just desserts: whatever your literary preference, there is a delicious symmetry in the fact that USC 18 §1001—which prohibits making “any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement” to a government official—was the statute under which Comey tormented and bankrupted General Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor for a few weeks in 2017.

Comey later entertained a live audience with an account of how that went down. It wasn’t typical, Comey admitted, but it was early days in an administration that looked disorganized. So he just called Flynn, said he wanted to send over a couple of agents, told him he needn’t bother having legal counsel around, and the rest was filed under “entrapment.”

Connoisseurs of narcissistically infused bathos will find much to savor in James Comey. No sooner was he indicted than the author of A Higher Loyalty, starring James Comey, took to Instagram to emit a moist declaration of his innocence, his defiance, his . . . well, his “higher loyalty.”

That bizarre clip is saturated with emetic, self-righteous sentimentality. Do not be disarmed. James Comey is an object lesson in the psychological truth that cloying sentimentality can easily cohabit with a malign vindictiveness. That aspect of Comey’s character was on view in 2023 when he sat down with Jen Psaki to talk about the hundreds upon hundreds of people rounded up in the aftermath of the January 6 outing at the Capitol. “Get them all,” Comey snarled. “Find everybody who went into that building. Find them all. . . . We will punish everyone who went in there. . . . We will hunt you to the end of the earth, even for a misdemeanor, and make you pay.” I wonder if it is true that Comey’s favorite reading is that sermon by Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”?

Comey’s fantasies of exacting punishment for January 6 are particularly bizarre in light of the recent revelation that some 275 plainclothes FBI agents were salted in the crowd on January 6, thus lending support to those of us who have long thought that that spectacle was less an insurrection, as the establishment was desperate to claim, than a “fedsurrection,” orchestrated and guided by the FBI and other federal agencies bent on destroying the legacy of President Trump.

What is going to happen? Informed opinion is divided. Some think it might look bad for Comey. Others think the brief, hastily drafted indictment will be dismissed. Maybe it will be. For one thing, the case will be heard in deep blue Virginia, where the pool of eligible jurors is likely to be sympathetic toward Comey. Then, too, the randomly assigned judge turns out to be a Biden appointee. Naturally, all judges in our august judicial system are perfectly impartial. But some, let us say, are more perfectly impartial than others.

Two points. The indictment was brought with such haste because the statute of limitations runs out on Comey’s alleged wrongdoing in just a couple of days, on September 30. This has led some commentators to suggest that Thursday’s indictment was merely the opening salvo, the preliminary beachhead.

The investigative reporter Catherine Herridge, for example, speculates that Thursday’s indictment was “a holding charge with the potential of a more complex, superseding indictment that adds more charges.”

Herridge bases her speculation on revelations in a recently declassified FBI investigation called “Arctic Haze.” (Don’t you just love these silly FBI code names? “Arctic Haze,” “Crossfire Hurricane”—what will they think of next?) According to Herridge, the investigation shows that James Rybicki, former FBI Chief of Staff; James Baker, former FBI General Counsel; Andrew McCabe, former FBI Deputy Director; and Daniel Richman, a Columbia Law Professor, all said they “coordinated media leaks at Comey’s direction.”

Plot, meet thickener? Maybe. Steve Bannon suggested on his War Room podcast that “The short Comey indictment is just the preface. A full RICO case could follow: multiple crimes, broad penalties, and the power to bankrupt the financiers behind organized political violence.” It would be pretty to think so.

But the name of Steve Bannon, one of the many people incarcerated as political prisoners by the Biden administration, brings me to my second point. As Trump’s Department of Justice zeros in on rogue intelligence and FBI agents, financial sponsors of violent agitation, and other lawless malcontents, the media is ringing with anguished cries of “Revenge,” not as a desideratum but as an accusation. “Trump is going after his political opponents,” we are told ad nauseam. “He is politicizing justice” (hence Comey’s malodorous declaration on Instagram that his “heart was breaking” for the Department of Justice).

All this can be summed up in the urgent question: Is what Trump is doing a matter of retribution or of justice?

But that, I submit, is the wrong question. There is no doubt that Trump is going after his political opponents—or, to put it more accurately, he is going after those of his opponents who went after him and his associates.

But the point to appreciate is that Trump’s goal is not vengeance (though that might be a collateral benefit to him personally) but rather the righting of a wrong. For years, the deep state waged war against all things Trump. Its agents sought to bankrupt Trump, to jail him (Comey was especially keen on that prospect). Was anyone surprised when at least two gunmen took the hint and tried to assassinate this “fascist,” this “Hitler,” this extreme threat to “the very foundations of our republic”?  The political establishment was bent on destroying Trump. Moreover, they had every reason to believe that they would succeed. Hence, the unbridled nature of their fury. They would rid themselves of the bad orange man and all his works one way or the other, “by any means necessary.” They would never be called to account.

Or so they thought.

Against the odds, Trump not only survived but also triumphed. But in the course of their scorched-earth campaign against Trump, his opponents acted like Pandora when she unsealed her fateful jar. The usual rules and conventions, the mannerly behavior, and the gentleman’s largesse were suddenly set loose. Perhaps, someday, they can be rounded up, placed back where they belong, and reinstated as the norms of political conduct. Perhaps.

Let’s call that the hope that remains behind in Pandora’s jar. Students of Hesiod may object that, really, hope was not the redemptive blessing it is often taken for, but the final evil in that container. Let’s leave that mournful contingency to one side. For us now, the important point is that Trump’s retribution is not an alternative to justice. On the contrary, it is the very name of, and the prerequisite for, justice.