Trading Law for Loyalty: The Quiet Death of the Neutral State
by u/MsAgentM
Synopsis
On September 20, 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social:
Later that week, the Department of Justice indicted James Comey, Letitia James, and John Bolton.
The James Comey Indictment
On May 3 2017, during a routine congressional oversight committee hearing, James Comey was asked if he “ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?” To which he replied “Never”. This question was specifically related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia Interference Probe.
In a separate matter, regarding an investigation into the Clinton Foundation in 2016, there were reports that Andrew McCabe, then the Deputy Director of the FBI, had stopped the investigation. While there was internal discussion about freezing the inquiry, McCabe stated he insisted it go forward. He instructed an aide to tell a reporter as much. McCabe also told the inspector general that Comey authorized the disclosure to the media.
On September 30th, 2020, during another Senate Judiciary Committee for Oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, Senator Cruz appeared to mix up the two investigations up when he asked Comey to confirm the testimony he gave in 2017 regarding anonymous media disclosures. After asking Comey about his testimony, he asked about reports of McCabe saying that Comey authorized his disclosure to the media confirming that he was not blocking an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Comey reaffirmed his 2017 testimony and has consistently denied authorizing McCabe’s media disclosure about his part in the Clinton Foundation investigation.
On September 25, 2025, James Comey, the former FBI Director, was indicted for making false statements during his hearing to the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 30th, 2020. He is accused of making false statements by saying he did not authorize “Person 3 to be an anonymous source in news reports regarding an investigation concerning Person 1.” He is also accused of impeding the investigation of the Senate Judiciary Committee by making false and misleading statements.
The statute of limitations for these charges is five years and the indictment came only 5 days before that would pass. The US Attorney, Erik Siebert, overseeing the District of Virginia investigating this matter stated that there was not enough evidence to pursue criminal charges. On September 19, President Trump told reporters that he wanted Siebert to leave and he concurred and resigned his position.
James Comey pleaded not guilty and that he intends to fight the charges in court.
Letitia James Indictment
On October 9th, 2025, Letitia James was indicted on charges of bank fraud and false statements to a financial institution. The Federal Government has accused her of purchasing a home in Norfolk Virginia and using what is known as a “Second Home Rider” to get the loan for the home and get a more favorable interest rate. The government states that Ms. James falsely stated that she would use this property as a vacation home while she actually rented it to a family of three.
According to the indictment, these more favorable terms allowed Ms. James to save just under $19,000 over the life of the loan.
James has accused Trump of a desperate weaponization of the justice system and said Trump's goal is clearly political retribution. She states the charges are baseless and that they have drawn criticism from both parties. She called for leaders to speak out against these charges and stands behind her department's lawsuit. She also vowed to fight the charges and continue her work as the Attorney General of New York.
Elizabeth Yusi was dismissed from her position as prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York after she stated she did not find probable cause to charge James. Her deputy, Kristin Bird, was also fired, but the reasons for it were not stated.
Letitia James sued Trump for similar civil charges in 2024 when she accused him of a scheme to deceive banks and insurers by inflating the value of his properties to get favorable loan terms while also deflating the values of those same properties to avoid tax liabilities. Trump was found liable and ordered to pay $527 million in relief and interest. The case was appealed, the penalty found to be excessive and vacated. The rest of the case was sent back for a retrial, though James has indicated that she will appeal the finding.
James pleaded not guilty on all counts during her arraignment on October 24, 2025.
Bolton Indictment
John Bolton was the National Security Advisor for Trump from 2018 to 2019. During that time, he utilized a private email account to document his time of service as a sort of diary with the intention of writing a book. The book, The Room where it happened, was initially blocked by the Trump administration but the suit was eventually settled in 2021 on the condition that Bolton would return to the government any material that might contain classified information. The Justice Department launched a criminal probe to determine if Bolton mishandled classified information, but it was eventually dropped after Biden took office. The investigation was reopened under Trump’s second administration, with Kash Patel overseeing national security matters.
On October 16, 2025, Bolton was charged with 8 counts of transmission of national defense Information (NDI) and 10 counts of retention of national defense information. Unlike the indictments for Comey and James, these charges were brought by Justice Department officials.
Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, stated that the charges against Bolton stem from diaries of his 45-year career in government service and have been known by the FBI since 2021.
On October 24, 2025, Trump posted again on Truth Social calling for more indictments:
“Just in: Documents show conclusively that Christopher Wray, Deranged Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, and other crooked lowlifes from the failed Biden Administration, signed off on Operation Arctic Frost. They spied on Senators and Congressmen/women, and even taped their calls. They cheated and rigged the 2020 Presidential Election. These Radical Left Lunatics should be prosecuted for their illegal and highly unethical behavior!”
Arctic Frost was the investigation of Trump’s role in overturning the 2020 election and inciting the January 6th Capital riot. A report that was recently released by the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley stated that Jack Smith sought publicly available metadata in his investigation. Trump provided no details explaining how they “cheated and rigged” the 2020 Presidential election. At the time, Christopher Wray was the only person working in government as the Trump-appointed FBI director. Jack Smith
was investigating war crimes in the Kosovo War, Merrick Garland was still sitting as a Federal Appeals Judge and Lisa Monaco had just come back from the private sector to work on Biden’s transition team.
James Comey, Letitia James, and John Bolton
The Media
These events are straightforward and well documented. Trump’s posts calling for indictments are still public. The indictments levied against Comey, James, and Bolton are accessible by anyone with an internet connection and a free afternoon. It has been a universal principle that law enforcement should be impartially administered and driven by the rule of law, not political mandate. But who decides what that looks like and how should we deal with the offenders? How we answer these questions will set the direction of our country and future precedent and the battle is being waged in the media over what that will be.
Left wing | Right wing |
Framing bias | |
The left wing frames Trump as violating democratic norms irreparably and abusing his power by pointing the DOJ at his enemies. The indictments are generally described as paper tigers with little to no chance of winning. | The right wing takes a few different approaches. Some admit these efforts are politically motivated, but frame this as karma from years of Trump being investigated abuses of power during the Biden admin. Some sources are predicting that the cases are unlikely to succeed, but may say that is due to a biased jury in Virginia or a biased media, not because the charges are unfounded. |
Narrative bias | |
Left wing sources present a narrative of Trump pushing his agenda onto resistant professionals and sometimes against the advice of his own cabinet. Instead of following the law, he is firing those not willing to pursue his enemies or sidelining those trying to explain why Comey and others should not be prosecuted and listening to people who will tell him what he wants to hear. | The right wing narrative is largely that Trump has been at the mercy of fake investigations started solely to ruin him. While his actions are heavy handed and out of the norm, they are either Trump responding in kind, justified considering what he has been through, or a necessary action to fight back against a vindictive Democratic Party. |
Omission bias | |
Left wing articles often don’t get into the details of exactly why Comey is being indicted and rarely try to present perspectives for why the indictments may be valid. | Many articles from right wing sources don’t inform readers that Halligan has no prosecutorial experience. The reports often claim that Trump is simply conducting the same type of investigations he was subject to, but they don’t go into why Trump was investigated or that none of those investigations were triggered by Biden ordering lawyers to investigate and charge according to his preference. |
Balance bias | |
Many right wing articles present Trump's investigations as on equal footing to what he was subject to since he became involved in politics in 2016. It doesn’t distinguish that Trump is ordering these investigations and firing seasoned professionals because they won’t take the cases while the ones into him came organically from seasoned professionals. Nor does it distinguish the strength of the cases. Many right wing articles leave out that Trump was convicted of one of the sets of charges and only got out of the others because he won a second term. Not because he overcame the charges in court. | |
False consensus | |
Many left wing articles give the impression that these cases will be dropped unilaterally. | |
The left wing states that Trump is using the law enforcement power of the Federal Government to pursue his political enemies, which is a violation of a fundamental democratic norm: that prosecutions should be driven by the rule of law and not subject to political pressures. Even if none of these efforts are successful, it will quell future efforts by professional staff to enforce the law impartially if they have to worry about repercussions for doing so. This further erodes the necessary institutional trust for the government function.
The right argues that Trump’s actions must be understood as a response to what they see as years of politically motivated investigations by federal agencies against him and his allies. From their perspective, the “norms” the left claims to defend were already broken when the FBI and DOJ were weaponized during the Russia probe, the first impeachment, and subsequent prosecutions. They contend that Trump is not destroying institutional trust but exposing and correcting a system that has long been biased. To them, his assertive stance toward the bureaucracy represents accountability, and holding those who abuse power responsible, rather than an attack on the rule of law itself.
My very biased doomer take:
This may make for good TV, but this is real life and shit rolls downhill. Trump and his ilk are not likely to sit idle, once they’ve exhausted their easier targets. In fact, they are already priming their base for a bigger target: Democrats.
Look at the trends here. Trump is knocking off his enemies. He is just starting with the ones that are the easiest to go after. He started with the immigrants, and not just undocumented ones that are criminals. His ICE is chasing down farm workers and people showing up for their immigration appointments. Curiously, ICE never seems to touch the farmers who hire them. He’s attacking colleges for their foreign students and charging high fees for H1-B visas for foreign workers.
His base loves this. So it’s an easy mark and builds momentum.
Now the indictments of long hated MAGA foes. Comey has long been blamed for the Russiagate story that dragged during Trump’s first term. James’ civil suit has been considered the result of a partisan witch hunt that looked to hold Trump responsible for what they argue is “business as usual”. Bolton is just a scorned employee looking for revenge after Trump fired him. Trump pushing for these indictments are just the vengeance his base wants to see, rule of law be damned.
It doesn’t stop with bureaucrats. Trump’s contempt extends to half the nation. Trump calls Democrats the “vermin” and “the enemy from within”. On the day of the No Kings Protest, he shared an AI video of him wearing a crown dumping excrement onto protesters.
Trump’s lack of respect for the other half of the country trickles through his party. Mike Johnson echoes Trump's framing by accusing Democrats of having “Marxists, Socialist, Antifa and pro-Hamas activists”. Karoline Leavitt treated legitimate questions with open mockery when a Huffington Post reporter asked who picked Budapest as the site for a meeting and she stated “Your mom did.”
Shit. Rolls. Down. Hill.
And for MAGA the message is loud and clear. It’s ok to say the quiet part out loud now. Just look at the questions directed at Vivek Ramaswamy at a recent Charlie Kirk event (or other remarks aimed at to him), or the comments under a picture of JD Vance with his wife, or any of the Republicans in the administration that dared mention the Diwali Festival of Lights on social media. The racism is loud and clear. Right winger and proud Trump supporter calling out their own for their less than “white” support.
Racist comment to Kash Patel's Diwali post.
If these last few months have shown us anything, it is that the Trumpers still don’t trust the government, even with Trump at the helm. What they trust are things that reaffirm their beliefs. The process doesn’t matter, because there is only one right answer.
This is the result of years of pecking away at their trust in government, harnessing their tendency to hold on to things faithfully, and warping their views of patriotism. The right-wing ecosystem has been successful in breaking the system but they do not control the direction of this avalanche. Republican leadership is so paralyzed by the forces they have unleashed with the Epstein files that Johnson is refusing to call the house into session because it means swearing in the deciding vote to force the issue. Once the assassin turned out to not be the liberal boogeyman Conservatives tried to make him out to be, influencers and others on the right started immediately questioning every component of Kirk's death and the motivations behind it. This is what happens when your movement is built on distrust, it eventually devours itself.
These influencers that boosted Trump’s message did so on an conspiratorial anti-establishment platform. That is their reflex and rarely do these people change course and evolve with the times. If Trump is the establishment, they, on some level, are his adversary, even as they amplify his message.
But that's not even the bad part. The final nail in this coffin is Trump’s contamination of the process itself. His blatant and public meddling in the DOJ is scraping the last dregs of trust it had. The people who are institutionalists and believe in the rules, principles and due process behind it, can no longer rely on its work. Sure the process was never perfect, but it was an incrementally improving effort seeking objectivity and fairness. This has been traded for Trump’s system today. Tomorrow, who knows.
What gets us out of this? Probably bad things, with horrible consequences, so people remember why those norms existed in the first place. I look at the evolution of Germany in the early 20th century and see clearly how trading institutional trust for a government built on loyalty and punishment implodes on itself. At first glance, it’s horrid, but as far as timelines, it was also quick and the consequences were clear.
Modern authoritarians have learned from history’s cautionary tales. They build systems more slowly, consolidate power through legality and bureaucracy. The result is a much more resilient system that works just well enough to avoid revolution. It's a slow suffocation while everyone insists it’s still breathing. The horseshoe is closing, not just economically, but existentially. Both sides now doubt the government’s legitimacy, and once that faith is gone, there’s no institution left to mediate the truth.