Comey Advises Against Prosecuting Trump: Justice Should Stay ‘Above the Partisan Scrum’

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Former FBI Director James Comey is advising the next administration to refrain from trying to issue criminal charges against outgoing President Donald Trump.

The new attorney general should not “pursue a criminal investigation of Donald Trump,” Comey asserts in his new book, Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency and Trust, “no matter how compelling the roadmap left” by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, or “how powerful the evidence strewn across his history of porn stars and financial fraud.

“Although those cases might be righteous in a vacuum, the mission of the next attorney general must be fostering the trust of the American people,” Comey added.

Prosecutors in the notoriously heavy-handed — and left-leaning — Southern District of New York have been probing Trump’s tax and business dealings. Federal law makes it difficult for prosecutors to charge a sitting president with a crime, but that obstacle will recede once Trump leaves office.

Trump moved in 2019 from Manhattan to one of his properties in Palm Beach, Florida, a jurisdiction that will place him largely outside the reach of New York’s prosecutors going forward. But it doesn’t preclude officials in the Empire State — or in the Justice Department — from pursuing investigations related to old allegations.

“Whether or not our next president pardons Donald Trump, and whether or not the Department of Justice pursues him, the American people should be told why,” Comey added.