How Much Is Trump Going To Destroy?
The Day Trump Indicted a Man for Seashells
Guest article by Dina Doll
I was in a courtroom this week when James Comey was indicted. Not the same courtroom. I was covering the preliminary hearing for Nick Reiner, a man charged with the murder of his parents. Reiner’s public defender stood up and requested yet another delay of his preliminary hearing, the next step the prosecutor must take to move the case to trial.
That is what the criminal justice system looks like up close.
It is slow. It is procedural. It is, on its surface, unremarkable. And that is entirely the point.
The system was not built for speed. It was built for protection. Hundreds of years of hard lessons, bad kings, crooked sheriffs, and railroaded defendants went into designing a process that puts friction between the government and the power to take away your liberty. Every scheduling date, every motion, every required appearance is a speed bump placed deliberately in the path of the state. Because the state is enormously powerful. And people are not.
We do not always get it right. The system fails people. Sometimes catastrophically. But we trust the process because the process is designed to make the government work for its conviction. To earn it.
Yet that same day, James Comey was indicted for a photograph of seashells.
According to the indictment, Comey posted a photo to Instagram last May showing shells arranged on a North Carolina beach in the shape of “86 47.” Federal prosecutors allege that a reasonable person would read this as a threat against the president. Never mind the first amendment. Never mind Comey says he saw the arrangement on a walk, photographed it, and did not realize some people would associate those numbers with violence. Never mind that e took the post down the same day.
This is the second time Trump’s Justice Department has tried to indict James Comey. The first attempt, which alleged he lied to Congress, was dismissed by a judge who found the prosecutor had not been lawfully appointed to the role.
They came back.
This time with seashells.
The distance between those two courtrooms is the distance between a republic and a regime. A man in a courtroom with a public defender, facing murder charges, getting his preliminary hearing scheduled with all the gravity and process that a system built over centuries demands. And a former FBI director, a longtime critic of the sitting president, being indicted twice by that president’s own Justice Department.
The first case thrown out because the person wasn’t even allowed to prosecute it.
The second one built on a beach photograph.
The criminal justice process being used as a weapon. The indictment. The press conference. The headlines. The fact that Comey must hire lawyers, again, and fight, again, while the president who fired him watches from the White House.
This is an insult to every part of the system I watched in operation this week. The system we all pay for. The care. The weight. The deliberateness with which prosecutorial power is supposed to be exercised. That power exists to protect communities from genuine harm. It is not supposed to be a tool a president aims at his critics.
When it is used that way, something breaks. Not just in the case. In the institution. In the public’s ability to trust that an indictment means something. That a charge reflects evidence and sober judgment and not a political score to settle.
I trust the criminal justice system most of the time. Not blindly. But I trust the architecture of it.
That trust is not infinitely renewable.
Nick Reiner got his hearing. The system ground forward as it is supposed to. Slow, careful, deliberate.
James Comey got his second indictment. For seashells.
I keep asking myself the same question.
How many systems is Trump going to destroy while Republicans just sit and watch?
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Dina Doll is an experienced attorney and legal analyst. She hosts the MissTrial podcast on MeidasTouch and co-hosts Unprecedented on Legal AF. Dina also serves as the legal expert for Access Hollywood’s Trial Files and provides regular legal commentary for CNN, NewsNation, and other national media outlets. In addition to her media work, she is a delegate to the California Democratic Party, a community activist, and a City Library Commissioner.
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He's the head of the snake, and has lots of help from our compromised government
It’s not just Trump. It’s the whole slew of them in Congress and the Supreme Court. Money means more to them than our freedoms.