Three Trump-era prosecutions collapse in one week; a judge calls one "a sideshow on top of a sideshow."

…(cont) October 23: two former FBI officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, self-surrender to face charges that they lied to Congress about their work on the Hunter Biden laptop investigation while assigned to the Foreign Influence Task Force. Four days later, the same week the department files a third round of charges against James Comey over a 2016 leak it investigated once and declined once, a federal judge looks at a new obstruction count added to the Floris and Benavides docket and calls it, for the record, "a sideshow on top of a sideshow." The count is tossed. During the lunch recess, Floris is seen crying in the courthouse hallway.

All together now: October 28, the same grand jury that heard the Hutchinson evidence on October 9 declines to return the indictment the department asked for. A Justice Department attorney rises in front of Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui and says so, on the record — a jury of ordinary citizens looked at the case against the witness who told Congress the president lunged for the wheel of his own SUV, and said no.

Three names. Three dockets. One department. By the 28th the count reads the way it read on the 1st: zero. The New York Times, writing up the same week, notices that the paperwork itself carries "unmistakable signs of urgency" — typos, the signatures of the department's senior political leadership — filed, the paper notes, as the midterms near. All together now, once more: the hurry is on the page. The convictions are not.