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For Immediate Release
September, 26 2025, 12:41pm EDT
Contact:
Sam Hananel: shananel@americanprogress.org.
Comey’s Indictment Is Nothing Short of Political Retribution
In response to the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, Ben Olinsky, senior vice president of Structural Reform and Governance at the Center for American Progress, shared the following comments:
The prosecution against Director Comey is nothing short of political retribution. President Donald Trump recently fired the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, his own appointee, after they made clear that prosecutors lack evidence to seek an indictment against former Director Comey. He then installed his own personal attorney, who has never prosecuted a case before, to the prosecutor’s office to carry out the president’s revenge tour.
President Trump’s government is operating more like a “banana republic” than a thriving democracy, and that should deeply alarm all Americans.
The Center for American Progress is a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action. We combine bold policy ideas with a modern communications platform to help shape the national debate, expose the hollowness of conservative governing philosophy and challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter.
LATEST NEWS
Alligator Alcatraz Is an 'Extrajudicial Black Site,' Immigrant Advocates Say as Detainees Disappear
According to the Miami Herald, over 1,000 detainees in Florida’s immigrant internment camp have effectively “disappeared,” with family and attorneys unable to track their whereabouts.
Sep 26, 2025
Immigrant rights activists in Florida are expressing alarm as they have found themselves "unable to locate" more than 1,000 detainees who have been "administratively disappeared" from the state's immigrant internment camp known as "Alligator Alcatraz."
Last week, the Miami Herald reported that "the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined" after the paper "obtained the names from two detainee rosters."
The reporters found that around 800 of the people on the rosters do not appear on Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Online Detainee Locator System, which provides publicly available information about the court status and locations of people who have been jailed by immigration enforcement. Another 450 had no location listed and instead merely instructed users to "Call ICE for details.”
The Herald also found that the vast majority of the detainees in the system did not have final orders of removal issued against them by immigration judges, which would be required for their deportation. Nevertheless, the detainees' families and attorneys have been left unable to find them.
Detainees and other witnesses, including several members of Congress who visited in July, have described the conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz as horrific. The ramshackle tent camp was set up in a matter of days this summer in the Everglades to warehouse thousands of people detained by ICE, often without criminal charges or warrants, and with restricted access to attorneys.
While people in federal immigration facilities are typically able to be tracked through the system, the state-run Alligator Alcatraz works differently.
(Video: Democracy Now!)
Shirsho Dasgupta, one of the reporters who broke the story for the Herald, told Democracy Now! on Thursday that attorneys he's spoken to often "don't know who to call" to get in contact with their clients.
Operations at Alligator Alcatraz were briefly halted in August when a federal district judge ruled against the facility on environmental grounds. But that ruling was stayed by a federal appeals court just two weeks later, allowing operations to resume.
While the state of Florida runs the facility, it has requested and was promised reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program, which was initially created to provide housing and other services to individuals released from ICE custody who were awaiting immigration court proceedings.
In a statement on Friday, the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC), which has also attempted to track the detainees, said that the Herald's report shows what they "have been warning about for months," that "those detained in this detention camp have effectively been administratively disappeared."
FLIC said that the state of Florida has refused to confirm how many detainees are currently in Alligator Alcatraz and that, in addition to those not listed on the ICE locator tool, they have also seen people deported before scheduled bond hearings. The group also said it had "confirmed data showing Florida is lying when claiming those detained at the Everglades camp had final orders of removal."
"Since this depraved torture camp funded with state FEMA funds reopened," said Tessa Petit, FLIC's executive director, "we have been unable to locate the fathers, brothers, friends, and sons that are caged there without due process in the ICE locator. Hospitalizations for severe medical incidents, which include cardiac incidents and surgeries, go unreported."
Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at FLIC, said: "What we’re seeing at Alligator Alcatraz is basically a new model of immigration detention, where a state-run facility is operating as an extrajudicial black site, completely outside of the previous models of immigration detention in this country. It’s making what was already a terrible system somehow even worse."
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Gaza Civilians Blown Apart—Including Children—Have Injuries Typical of Battlefield Soldiers: Study
"Explosive weapons, designed for open battlefields, are increasingly being deployed in densely populated urban areas," the researchers found.
Sep 26, 2025
A new study has found that Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from injuries inflicted by the Israeli military that are typically seen in soldiers on battlefields.
The study, which was published in the British Medical Journal on Thursday, found that explosive injuries to Gaza civilians accounted for two-thirds of injuries they studied, which it said was roughly the same percentage of explosive injuries suffered by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In total, the study collected data from 78 healthcare workers employed across 22 different NGOs stationed in Gaza.
The report notes that this rate of explosive injuries is more than double the 31% typically suffered by civilian populations in war zones.
"The resulting injury profiles resembled those reported in combat settings among trained military personnel, highlighting the burden of trauma among civilians in Gaza," the study explained. "Explosive weapons, designed for open battlefields, are increasingly being deployed in densely populated urban areas."
The study also found a higher than average incidence of burn injuries among civilians in Gaza compared to other conflicts, with 30% of these burns extending "into muscle and bone, resulting in complex, high morbidity wounds with limited options for definitive care, consistent with the use of incendiary and fuel-air munitions."
In addition to examining traumatic wounds, the researchers found that Gazans are suffering from a severe public health crisis with widespread incidences of infectious and chronic diseases, as well as thousands of instances of malnutrition. They said these conditions have come about due to "the systemic collapse of healthcare due to the blockade, fractured pathways, and loss of facilities" in Gaza.
In an interview with The Guardian, study co-author Bilal Irfan, a bioethicist who conducts research at the University of Michigan, said that the research may be underestimating the severity of civilian suffering in Gaza simply because it only studied wounds of people who survived long enough to be taken in for medical treatment.
"This is data for the patients who made it to hospital and so survived," he said. "We don’t even have a full profile of the serious injuries of those who died without any medical attention."
The study describes this in more graphic terms, as it notes that its data "excludes the victims of high explosive weapons whose bodies were obliterated or rendered unrecognizable, those incinerated in fireballs, torn apart by aerial bombardment, or reduced to fragments in the epicenter of 2,000 pound munitions."
Such excluded victims, the study continues, "never entered hospital records and thus remain absent from our body atlas of injuries. They are the disappeared: the thousands of missing people, many of them children, whose remains could not even be identified. Their absence is itself a reminder of the scale of destruction and the limits of what clinical data can ever capture."
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'There'll Be Others': Comey Just the Beginning of DOJ Targets, Trump Warns
"You can expect to see more of this sort of fact-free, ethically-compromised indictment as Trump works through his enemies list," said one observer.
Sep 26, 2025
US President Donald Trump said Friday that the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey is likely just the beginning of what critics are calling a "revenge tour" aimed at punishing perceived political enemies—especially officials who held the convicted felon accountable or tried to do so.
The president was asked by a reporter outside the White House in Washington, DC, "Now that James Comey has been indicted, who is the next person on your list in this retribution?"
Trump replied: "It's not a list, but I think there'll be others. I mean, they're corrupt. These were corrupt radical left Democrats."
"Comey was essentially a Dem... he was worse than a Democrat," Trump said of the former FBI director, who was a registered Republican for most of his adult life before leaving the party and becoming unaffiliated in 2016. "I would say the Democrats are better than Comey."
"But there'll be others," the president reiterated. "That's my opinion. They weaponized the Justice Department like nobody in history. What they've done is terrible. And so... frankly, I hope there are others [because] you can't let this happen to a country."
Q: Now that Comey has been indicted, who is the next person on your list?TRUMP: It's not a list, but I think they'll be others. I mean, they're corrupt. These were corrupt radical left Democrats.
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 26, 2025 at 7:11 AM
Comey was indicted Thursday by newly installed US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan—a former personal lawyer for Trump who has never prosecuted a case—for allegedly lying to Congress and obstructing congressional proceedings related to testimony he delivered before a US Senate committee in 2020. He was charged despite career Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors finding insufficient evidence to pursue a case.
Attorney and author Lisa Needham wrote Friday that given that Halligan has "already proven more than willing to do whatever Trump says... you can expect to see more of this sort of fact-free, ethically-compromised indictment as Trump works through his enemies list."
Trump pushed out Erik Siebert, Halligan's predecessor, amid his refusal to indict Comey or file mortgage fraud charges against Democratic New York Attorney General Leticia James, who in 2022 filed a civil lawsuit against the then-former president, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization for business fraud. They were found liable for fraud and ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, although an appeals court later overturned the fine while upholding the fraud findings.
Last month, the DOJ subpoenaed James as part of a probe into whether she violated Trump's civil rights by suing him, his sons, and his business.
Comey's indictment followed mounting pressure from the president and his supporters for embattled US Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge Comey, James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who as a House lawmaker managed Trump's first impeachment trial in 2020.
"There’s no separation between the Department of Justice and Trump’s desire for retribution," Needham wrote. "However, because, as political science professor Mark Copelovitch puts it, 'Performative public lying is a hallmark of far right authoritarian parties,' both Trump and Bondi are pretending that this is a run-of-the-mill prosecution as opposed to yet another stop on Trump’s vengeance tour."
Other critics allege that, like some other recent administration moves, Comey's indictment is part of an attempt to distract from the harms of Trump's economic policies, his handling of the Epstein documents, and the corruption scandal involving "border czar" Tom Homan allegedly receiving a $50,000 cash bribe.
"The Department of Justice is in full cover-up mode," Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)—who managed Trump's second House impeachment trial—said during a Friday morning interview on CNN. "They're doing the bidding of President Trump with respect to Mr. Comey, they're doing the bidding of President Trump with respect to covering up cases."
"The administration started off by having Trump basically force out the US attorney for New York, another Republican, Danielle Sassoon, because she wouldn't quash a grand jury indictment against [New York City Mayor Eric] Adams because he had become a political friend of Donald Trump's," Raskin continued.
"So what we see is the complete politicization of the Department of Justice," he added. "But we're in the midst of trying to get this information with apparently real crimes and we've got a strong bipartisan majority saying stop the cover-up of the Epstein files, just go ahead and release them."
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