The indictment of former FBI director James Comey is part of a concerted effort by Donald Trump to “rewrite history” in his favor, a former senior White House lawyer claimed on Sunday as he warned of more retribution to come for the president’s political opponents.
Ty Cobb, who defended Trump’s first administration during the Mueller investigation into his 2016 campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, also told CBS that he doubted Comey would be convicted, if the case ever reached trial.
Trump’s moves, he said on the Sunday morning show Face the Nation, were “wholly unconstitutional [and] authoritarian” and an attempt to hoodwink future generations.
Related: ‘Dangerous abuse of power’: lawmakers sound alarm over Comey indictment
“Trump wants to rewrite history so that the next generation may not know that he incited a violent insurrection, refused to peacefully transfer the power of the presidency after losing an election, stole classified documents and showed them to friends and guests at Mar-a-Lago, and that he was a criminal,” Cobb said.
“He’s a convicted felon. All, anybody involved in those events that offended him, they’re in real danger.”
Cobb, a distant relative of the baseball legend with the same name, has become a vocal Trump critic since serving as his liaison to special counsel Robert Mueller, and said his role as lawyer for the administration, not as a personal attorney to the president, allowed him to call “balls and strikes” now.
He laid out why he thought the indictment against Comey, for allegedly lying to Congress, was fatally flawed; and assailed Trump’s appointment of a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience to pursue the case, after he fired a federal prosecutor, Erik Siebert, when he declined to bring charges.
“So, you have the rewriting history stuff. The US attorney that he appointed, his personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan, her role previously in the administration was, you know, trying to eliminate the theory that, you know, America had slaves, at the Smithsonian,” he said.
“She was there to whitewash the Smithsonian and paint America as something that it isn’t. America needs to learn from the mistakes and lessons that we’ve had, and one of the biggest mistakes that America ever had was re-electing President Trump.”
Cobb’s front-row seat to the machinations of Trump’s first term has made him an in-demand commentator on the workings of the second, and he told CBS he does not like what he sees.
“Former attorney general [Robert] Jackson, the Nuremberg prosecutor, highlighted in 1940 that the most important thing at the justice department when he was attorney general was that people not target individuals, that they merely pursue crimes,” he said.
Related: Trump says he expects charges for other adversaries after Comey indictment
“Griffin Bell years later said essentially the same thing [and] emphasized how politics and favor have no business at the justice department. It’s all about even-handedness.”
Cobb said Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, has “wholly abandoned that and is now merely doing the president’s bidding when he says, ‘Prosecute my enemies, now’”.
But the case against Comey, he said, was flimsy at best, and would almost certainly collapse.
“The grand jury rejected one of the counts, the top count, actually, in the indictment, approved two, but by a very slim margin, 14 out of 23 in a process where there’s no defense attorney in the room, and the standard is merely probable cause,” he said.
“The next courtroom that this will be assessed in, if it gets to trial, requires unanimity from 12 people, and there will be a vigorous defense. I don’t see any way in the world that Comey will be convicted. And I think there’s a good chance, because of the wholly unconstitutional, authoritarian way that this was done, that the case may get tossed out well before trial.”
Separately, without mentioning Trump, his appointed FBI director Kash Patel contradicted a recent social media claim by the president that nearly 275 of the bureau’s agents were planted among the pro-Trump crowd that carried out the 2021 US Capitol attack.
Patel reportedly issued a statement to Fox News Digital, according to the outlet, in which he said FBI agents at the scene of the attack were only sent to the scene after the mob attacked the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep Trump in office despite his losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.
Issued Saturday night, the statement from Patel did make it a point to say that was not “the proper role of FBI agents”, among other things.
In yet another bizarre social media episode for Trump, he posted – and then deleted – an artificial intelligence video in which his likeness was promoting magic medical beds that a far-right conspiracy claims can cure any ailment. The video depicted Trump touting a card guaranteeing access to new hospitals equipped with such beds.
