The Speaker of the House Is Abetting Authoritarianism
On September 20, Trump all but ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to secure indictments and convictions against three political targets. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as h---,” he instructed Bondi in a Truth Social post. “We can’t delay any longer . . . JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Everyone saw Trump’s message. For days, it was the talk of the political world. But Johnson pretended it hadn’t happened. On September 28, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked the speaker: “Don’t you have any qualms about any president telling an attorney general, ‘Go after these three political opponents?’” Johnson, with a straight face, replied, “I don’t think that’s what he did.”
Two days after that interview—and after Trump orchestrated Comey’s indictment by ousting a prosecutor and installing Lindsey Halligan, one of his own former personal attorneys, to get the job done—CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked the speaker about this plainly autocratic move. “My understanding is that the previous prosecutor refused to bring the case, because they didn’t think it was a strong enough case,” Sorkin observed. “So you have a situation where the president effectively directed their own lawyer to bring that case.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Johnson objected. He argued that Halligan’s decision to bring the case, after Trump fired the previous prosecutor for not bringing it, was a perfectly fine example of “the prosecutor’s discretion.”