We’re Led by an Administration of Liars
And the Comey case hypocrisy is as bad as the incompetence.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S lying-to-Congress case against former FBI director James Comey is a comedy of legal errors that could move offstage soon. (UPDATE, November 24, 2025, 3:00 p.m.: The case was dismissed, several hours after this article was published.) But it has highlighted the plain fact that American life and America itself are now being shaped—in terrible, even tragic ways—by people who really did mislead and outright lie to Congress under oath.
Let’s start at the top. Not just once but twice, Donald Trump put his hand on a Bible and swore to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He’s been violating that oath, and lying nonstop in all conceivable venues, ever since.
Right below Trump on the organizational chart is the problem wreaking daily havoc on the country: that so many of these havoc perpetrators were less than forthright when they were trying to get their jobs.
For instance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., founder of an anti-vaccine nonprofit, is a notorious spreader of medical misinformation—he even captured the “top superspreader” title in a 2021 study of COVID-19 misinformation reshares on Twitter. This year he told the Senate Finance Committee under oath that he is not anti-vaccine and would do nothing as health secretary “that makes it difficult or discourages people” from taking vaccines. He also made several commitments to Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician, to win his support in the closely divided Senate, then went on to break them.
Among these was a promise to keep language on the Centers for Disease Control website that says vaccines do not cause autism. Kennedy personally broke that one last Wednesday, the latest of the many ways he has undermined and restricted vaccines since becoming health secretary in February, even amid ongoing measles outbreaks. And the misinformation avalanche has not abated. Last month, the man in charge of U.S. public health asserted without evidence that Tylenol and circumcision cause autism.
Then there’s the defense secretary (or, as he prefers, war secretary), Pete Hegseth, who has derided the idea of women in the military and in combat. “What do you have to say to the almost 400,000 women who are serving today about your position on whether they should be capable to rise through the highest ranks?” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen asked him at his January confirmation hearing.
Hegseth said he’d tell them he’d be “honored to serve alongside you, shoulder to shoulder, men and women, black, white, all backgrounds with a shared purpose . . . and you will be treated fairly.” But by February he had fired the black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ousted all four women who were four-star generals. Last month he said he’d hold the military to “the highest male standard” for combat positions—which would likely result in large numbers of women removed from combat roles. “So be it,” he said.
Peak political theater
Kristi Noem, under oath at her confirmation hearing to be homeland security secretary, assured senators that “under President Trump’s administration, disaster and emergency relief will not be handed out with political bias. Every American will be responded to and treated equally.” But that is not what’s happening. She also said Trump has been “very clear that his priority is going to be deporting criminals.” That’s not happening, either.
The crackdowns at workplaces, streets, parks, homes, and courthouses across the country have swept up citizens, legal residents, applicants for legal status, a daycare teacher with a work permit, and even a teenage intern for a judge. They’ve broken up families and destroyed tourism. As of mid-November, nearly three quarters of over 65,000 ICE detainees had no criminal convictions, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which said “many of those convicted” had committed minor offenses such as traffic violations.
The shows of force by immigration agents and even military troops are designed to terrify communities—the height of performative politics, and it’s working. This after Noem agreed under questioning that immigration policy would be driven by “facts and information,” not “political theater.” Still, as secretary, she quickly earned the nickname ICE Barbie “for her love of dressing up for PR opportunities,” as Daily Beast writer Tom Latchem put it.
Noem “brought her hair extensions to El Salvador,” one headline said, where she posed for a glam shot in front of caged prisoners at CECOT. In other publicity photos, she rides on horseback with the border patrol. She’s usually among men in uniform, often holding a gun, wearing a cowboy hat, a baseball cap with official insignia, whatever headwear fits the cosplay at hand. Political theater is alive and well, a jarring backdrop to the careless brutality of immigration policy under Noem and Trump.
Tense hearings for Trump’s Justice Department picks elicited some whoppers. FBI Director Kash Patel, pressed during his confirmation hearing by Sen. Richard Blumenthal to say he’d protect federal prosecutors who worked on the January 6th case, said under oath that “every FBI employee will be held to the absolute same standard, and no one will be terminated for case assignments.” Pressed further, he added, “All FBI employees will be protected against political retribution.” A few months later, Blumenthal told Patel: “I’m not going to mince words: You lied to us.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi made a similar commitment—in her confirmation hearing’s opening statement, no less. “Most importantly, if confirmed, I will fight every day to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice and each of its components,” she said under oath. “The partisanship, the weaponization will be gone. America will have one tier of justice for all.”
Since her promises, and Patel’s, many prosecutors have been fired, forced out, or moved to resign in protest. Among the lawsuits so far are one from Comey’s daughter, former federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, claiming she was fired for unconstitutional political reasons, and one from several ousted agents in part over a demand that the FBI hand over a list of prosecutors who worked on the January 6th case. On top of that, Trump has issued pardons or commutations to hundreds of allies, including 17 politicians and nearly 1,600 who were prosecuted in connection with the January 6th Capitol riot, while urging Bondi to prosecute his enemies—Comey included—as quickly as possible.
A ridiculous case against a hapless foe
Did Comey lie to Congress and obstruct justice? In May 2017 testimony under oath, eight days before Trump fired him, he said he had not been an anonymous source regarding the FBI’s investigations into Trump and Hillary Clinton, nor had he authorized someone else “at the FBI” to be an anonymous source. In 2020 he told senators that he stood by his earlier testimony. The person prosecutors say they’re talking about, Comey friend and adviser Daniel Richman, was not “at the FBI” during the time period in question, according to a Lawfare analysis, and the evidence does not show he was an anonymous source before Comey’s 2017 testimony. Beyond that, the question posed to Comey in 2020 seemed to refer to his deputy, Andrew McCabe—not Richman.
I’m no fan of Comey, whose grave 2016 misjudgments on his Clinton and Trump investigations set us up for the existential crisis we face today. But the case against him is so weak that Erik Siebert, the interim U.S. attorney, declined to prosecute and was then forced out of his job. The episode has grown increasingly surreal under his interim successor, friend-of-Trump and former insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan.
One judge alone listed eleven findings that “establish a reasonable basis” for a defense challenge, ranging from the painfully inexperienced Halligan seeming to mislead the grand jury on crucial (and far from esoteric) matters of law, to an apparent gap in the record of grand jury proceedings, to an FBI agent exposed to possibly privileged material who “chose to testify before the grand jury” rather than “contain any further exposure to privileged information and limit any prejudice to Mr. Comey.”
Also: Halligan may have been improperly appointed. (UPDATE, November 24, 2025, 3:00 p.m.: She was, a judge ruled Monday.) This may be a vindictive prosecution. (Ya think?) On Wednesday, we learned that the grand jury did not see or vote on the final two-count indictment—and by Friday, Comey had filed for dismissal due to these “fundamental errors.”
The whole flimsy, incompetent attempt to punish Comey seems doomed. And while one failure won’t derail this out-of-control president or the blatant lies and hypocrisy that pervade his administration, it would be a start.
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