DOJ charges Comey a third time over a 2016 leak it once declined to prosecute

…(cont) Mr. Comey answers in three words: "I'm still innocent." The sentence hasn't changed. Neither, really, has the leak underneath it.

What changed is the week it landed in. Days before the indictment, a federal judge rules that the Trump administration illegally fired Maurene Comey — a federal prosecutor, and the defendant's daughter — from her job. She believes, and the judge found enough in the record to agree, that she was let go for who her father is. The indictment and the personnel ruling are two different documents, from two different parts of the same department, about two people who share a last name, filed in the same week.

Read the counts against the ruling: a government that spent years declining to charge the father over a 2016 leak spent this week also losing in federal court over how it treated the daughter. Nothing in the new indictment is new evidence — the leak is the same leak the department already investigated and let go. Nothing in the firing was legal, on the judge's own finding. What is new is only that both documents carry the same surname in the same seven days, and both carry the Justice Department's letterhead.

I don't know yet what the Espionage Act counts will show a jury. I know what the week's filings show a reader: one leak, declined once, charged twice more since; one job, taken once, ordered given back.