Former FBI Director James Comey was charged on September 25, 2025, with two counts of lying and blocking a government investigation. The charges are connected to what he said when he spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020. This happened just days after President Donald Trump publicly told Attorney General Pam Bondi to go after Comey and other people he sees as enemies. Comey said he is innocent in a video posted to Instagram, adding that his family has known for years that standing up to Donald Trump comes with a cost. The charges came after a wild week at the Justice Department’s Eastern District of Virginia office. Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney Trump had picked for the job, quit under pressure after he decided there was not enough proof to charge Comey. Trump fired Siebert and quickly replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide and former Trump personal lawyer who has never handled a criminal case before. According to Fox News, “Halligan couldn’t even find the courtroom, and no prosecutor in the office agreed to accompany her, as is customary.” The charges were signed only by Halligan, which legal experts say shows that career prosecutors did not agree with the case. Dan Abrams, ABC’s chief legal analyst, said on This Week that “I don’t even think that many in the Trump administration believe they’re going to get a conviction. I think that there’s a 95 percent-plus chance that there won’t be a conviction.” Trump’s ongoing push to go after his political enemies The Comey charges are part of a bigger pattern of Trump telling the Justice Department to look into his political enemies. Trump has publicly asked for New York Attorney General Letitia James to be charged with mortgage fraud. He also wants Senator Adam Schiff looked into for similar claims. Both have said they did nothing wrong and called the investigations political payback. View this post on Instagram A post shared by James Comey (@comey) Legal experts say Trump’s actions break long-standing Justice Department rules that kept criminal cases separate from White House meddling. Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor writing for National Review, called the Comey charges “so ill-conceived and incompetently drafted, he should be able to get it thrown out on a pretrial motion to dismiss.” The lying claims against Comey were already looked into by special counsel John Durham and the Justice Department’s inspector general during Trump’s first time in office. Neither brought charges. Before Comey was charged, staff at the U.S. attorney’s office wrote a memo saying charges should not be brought against the former FBI director because there was not enough proof. Trump celebrated the charges on Truth Social, calling Comey “one of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to.” When reporters asked who else might face charges, Trump said there would be others because “they’re corrupt” and “these were corrupt, radical left Democrats.” Critics warn this creates a never-ending cycle of political revenge where each administration looks into the one before it.