Justice Department charges Comey a third time, days after a judge ruled it illegally fired his daughter.

…(cont) Here's what I keep running into, and maybe you can tell me where I've got it wrong. The two investigations that looked at this same leak closed without charges — no indictment, nothing. Did the people running the third one have anything in front of them that the first two didn't? Were there new documents nobody had the first two times? Because if there weren't, what's different about the file now.

I went out to the car around one in the morning, the way I do when I can't sleep — the fan belt's been making that sound again — and I ended up standing there with the glovebox open, going through it for no reason except my hands needed something to do. There's an old inspection sticker in there, a parking ticket I never paid, the registration, and an owner's manual I've never once opened. Four things. I know exactly what's in there because it's small enough to know, start to finish, in under a minute. A federal leak investigation isn't a glovebox. It has more people looking into it than I have hands. And it still came up with nothing, twice, before somebody opened it a third time.

The charges against Comey — two counts about leaking information related to national defense, where the charges themselves, the Guardian wrote, provide few details about what Comey is alleged to have leaked — were filed Monday, the same day Judge Jesse Furman ruled that Comey's daughter, Maurene Comey, had been illegally fired from her job as a federal prosecutor in New York, a job she'd held for a decade, with work the Guardian calls widely praised. She worked the Epstein case. She was let go in July of last year. The filing date and the ruling date land on the same square of the calendar, and that's not me reading something into it — that's what the paper printed.

He's on camera about it from that same week. "I'm still innocent. I'm still not afraid of these people and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary." That's him, saying that about himself, which a person is entitled to do, and I'm only passing it along, not grading it.

His lawyers are due in front of a federal judge this Friday, asking that the third case be thrown out before it goes any further. Nobody had to stand in front of a judge to throw out the first two. This one needs a courtroom. What does a case need a hearing for, that the other two never needed one for?

I was about done for the night — glovebox shut, coffee cold, notebook still missing — when I remembered the other thing. Actually, hang on, one more before you go. The judge who ruled Monday that Comey's daughter was illegally fired — that was the same Monday they filed count three against her father. Same calendar. Same square. Was it?