The Possible Trial of Jim Comey and Secretary of War [sic] Pete Hegseth’s Summoning of Senior U.S. Generals: What is Wrong with these Pictures?

Doesn’t putting so many top officers in one place create a decapitation risk? Why not use secure telecoms or video calls instead—or is that naïve?

This Post was prepared prior to President Trump’s announcement on September 27, 2025, he would deploy federal troops to Portland, Oregon, “authorizing full force, if necessary,” ostensibly to protect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities from what the White House labels “domestic terrorists” (in particular, Antifa). His narrative frames Portland as under siege and “war-ravaged,” justifying military intervention in American cities. Federal officials have claimed that some protests and skirmishes around the ICE building necessitate reinforcement. Where are the guardrails? See “Trump orders deployment of troops to Portland and authorises ‘full force’,” BBC, Nadine Yousif, September 27, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cddmn6ge6e2o, ”Trump calls for troops in Portland, escalating use of military inside U.S.,” Washington Post, Michael Birnbaum, September 27, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/09/27/trump-military-portland-ice, “Trump says he is authorizing military to use ‘Full Force’ in Portland,” Politico, Gregory Svirnovskiy, et al., September 27, 2025, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/27/donald-trump-portland-troops-00583380.

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At the outset, one should note that it is difficult to imagine the Trump Administration successfully mounting a true “show trial” of former FBI Director James Comey. However much it might long for such a spectacle, it cannot fully reproduce the dynamics of Stalin’s 1930s tribunals. Let us hope that the protections of the First Amendment, together with the proliferation of social media and the continued presence of independent (non-corporate) outlets, make it impossible for any single official narrative to monopolize, distort, or recast public perception in the way the Soviet regime once could.

However much Donald Trump might fantasize about casting Comey in the role of a modern-day Bukharin or Tukhachevsky, the analogy breaks down. The claim that Comey helped engineer the so-called “Russian hoax” is not only implausible; it is flatly counterfactual. The Administration cannot compel the American public to accept a fabricated confession in the way that the Soviet state once could through its control of courts, prisons, and press.

What we are witnessing, rather, is yet another attempt to rewrite the history of Trump’s own relationship with the Kremlin—whether Soviet predecessors or contemporary Russian elites. That history, and the political anxieties it generated, is well documented. The effort to transpose Soviet-style legal theater onto the American stage will falter because the structural conditions that enabled the Moscow show trials do not exist in a constitutional system grounded in free speech, adversarial process, and multiple competing sources of information.

THE PAST

Soviet-Style Show Trials Are a Thing of the Past and Difficult to Stage Under the Best of Circumstances

The Soviet “show trials” of the 1930s were a quintessential element of Stalin’s Great Purge, carefully choreographed legal dramas designed to transform coerced confessions into spectacles of state legitimacy. They relied not on real evidence, but on the theater of submission, the denunciatory eloquence of prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, and the absolute control of the press. In this climate, the fate of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and of Nikolai Bukharin shows how even unconvincing confessions could be rendered convincing by the absence of an independent public sphere.

The Tukhachevsky case of June 1937 illustrates how repression could operate in secrecy and still serve propaganda ends. Tukhachevsky and eight top Red Army commanders were arrested on charges of treason and conspiracy with Nazi Germany. Their “confessions” had been extracted under NKVD torture. The trial itself was held in camera before a military tribunal, and the defendants were executed the same day. Later accounts speculated that Nazi intelligence planted forged documents to encourage Stalin’s suspicions, but post-Soviet archival research has made clear that Stalin’s security services manufactured the conspiracy narrative and relied on coerced testimony at trial. Yet even though the trial was closed, the state-controlled press soon reported the purge of “traitors in the army” as a fact, and with no independent sources of information, the Soviet public was forced to accept the narrative of betrayal at the highest levels of the military hierarchy. The consequences of these trials are discussed below. [1]

The Bukharin trial, by contrast, was staged as a public morality play. In March 1938, during the “Trial of the Twenty-One,” Bukharin—the former head of the Communist International and once Lenin’s “golden boy”—sat in the dock, accused of espionage, terrorism, and plotting to restore capitalism. The transcripts show that Bukharin equivocated: he denied specific charges, particularly espionage, but in the end offered a broader, philosophical admission of “political responsibility.” His partial confession, hedged and logically strained, would have struck an independent audience as dubious. But in the context of Vyshinsky’s thunderous accusations, the orchestrated testimony of co-defendants, and the daily coverage in Pravda and Izvestiya, the narrative of guilt became inescapable. Bukharin was condemned and executed soon after. [2]

As Stephen F. Cohen and other scholars have argued, these trials were not merely about eliminating political enemies, but about rewriting the Party’s past and legitimizing Stalin’s rule through public ritual. The ambiguous, even tortured confessions—so unpersuasive on their face—were transformed into collective “truths” through the monopoly of state-controlled media. Without rival newspapers, independent courts, or opposition voices, the Soviet citizen was compelled to accept that the guilty had unmasked themselves before the people. [3]

Thus, whether held in secret (Tukhachevsky) or in public (Bukharin), the show trials reveal how Stalin’s government weaponized confession and publicity. They were less about proving guilt than about demonstrating the omnipotence of the state and the futility of resistance. Their power lay not in the coherence of the evidence, but in the fact that only one version of events could legally exist.

THE RECENT PAST

Indicting Jim Comey for lying when testifying in response to a question of Texas Senator Ted Cruz is the crux of the matter. A central feature of the debate over the indictment of James Comey is the role of the Justice Department’s own oversight reports. In 2018, the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General issued a lengthy review of FBI and DOJ actions during the 2016 election, including the conduct of senior officials such as Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe. That report sharply criticized McCabe for unauthorized disclosures to the press but did not conclude that Comey had engaged in similar misconduct. For critics of the current charges, this silence is telling: if the government’s own watchdog did not identify the wrongdoing now alleged, the basis for prosecution appears questionable. [4]

The indictment focuses on Comey’s 2020 testimony before Senator Ted Cruz, when Cruz asked whether he had ever authorized someone at the FBI to serve as an anonymous source for reporters. Comey denied doing so, and prosecutors now claim that denial was false, pointing to an individual described as “Person 3” who they allege had been authorized. The problem, as some legal analysts have noted, is that the wording of Cruz’s question and Comey’s answer may not align precisely with the charge, making it difficult to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Comey intentionally lied. [5]

Commentators such as Michael Popok have highlighted the Inspector General’s findings as a reason to doubt the indictment, arguing that if earlier, exhaustive scrutiny failed to uncover such misconduct, the new allegations must rest on shaky ground. Yet the limitations of the IG’s mandate are important: its review centered on the Clinton email investigation and related matters, not every aspect of FBI leadership’s dealings with the media. The absence of a finding in 2018 does not automatically negate the possibility that later evidence might support a charge. Still, the discrepancy between past oversight conclusions and the present indictment strengthens the perception that this case is as much about political theater as legal substance. [6]

Proverbs

The indictment of Comey being brought by an attorney who recently worked as a Trump aide in the while coming on so soon after current FBI Director’s testimony before Senate and Congressional Committees, this is a notable and ironic example of the pot calling the kettle black (pardon my use of the cliche). Or perhaps Russian proverbs are more suitable:

“Чья бы корова мычала, а твоя бы молчала.” (Ch’ya by korova mychala, a tvoya by molchala)

Literal translation: “Whose cow would moo, but yours should stay silent.” [👉 It carries the same meaning: someone guilty of a fault accusing another of the very same fault]; or

“На воре и шапка горит.” (Na vore i shapka gorit) — “The thief’s hat is on fire.”

Secretary of War [sic] Pete Hegseth’s summoning of senior U.S. generals and flag officers probably demands some historical context. Coming so soon after his attempts to stifle reporting about anything that might put the Administration’s military policies and performance in a bad light, this is especially alarming.

I would like to offer some (it is readily apparent to all students of history, and yours in particular, as well as most Europeans):

Stalin’s Purges, Generals, Colonels, and Their Practical Military and Political Consequences

Gathering many senior military officers in one place is exactly the kind of vulnerability that an authoritarian leader can exploit — and in many historical purges, that vulnerability was either deliberately created or ruthlessly exploited. Putting a group of high-ranking commanders together makes it easy to arrest, isolate, intimidate, and (if the regime wants) remove the military’s senior layer in one sweep. That both decapitates an opponent’s ability to coordinate an immediate response and produces a tidy roster of scapegoats for public political theater.

Stalin’s purge of the Red Army in the late 1930s eliminated a generation of experienced commanders at precisely the moment when the Soviet Union faced mounting external threats. By decapitating the military’s leadership, Stalin crippled its operational competence and destroyed institutional confidence.

The immediate consequence was seen in the disastrous Soviet performance during the Winter War with Finland (1939–40). Despite overwhelming numerical superiority, the Red Army suffered grievous losses and revealed serious deficiencies in coordination, logistics, and tactical execution [7].

These weaknesses emboldened adversaries and informed Hitler’s calculus in launching Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, where German forces initially advanced with shocking speed across Soviet territory. The purges had left the Red Army disorganized, hesitant, and unable to mount effective resistance in the opening months of the invasion. [8]

Yet Stalin’s paranoia was not unique. Authoritarian regimes frequently harbor deep suspicions of their military officers, particularly at the colonel level. History demonstrates that colonels—close enough to command troops but not yet absorbed into the elite—have often been the prime movers of coups.

Generals, cushioned by privilege, tend toward loyalty; colonels remain ambitious and flexible. Muammar Gaddafi’s 1969 coup in Libya, Colonel Reza Khan’s seizure of power in Iran in 1921, and the 1967 Greek junta all exemplify this pattern. Hence the cynical quip: “dictators don’t want any colonels.” The logic is straightforward—those with just enough authority to mobilize force but insufficient investment in the regime’s status quo are the most dangerous. [9]

Stalin’s solution was to destroy the officer corps wholesale, sacrificing military readiness for personal security. Other dictators have opted for subtler methods. Hitler, in 1934, after the Night of the Long Knives, summoned Reichswehr officers and required them to swear an oath of personal loyalty—not to Germany, but to him. [10]

This maneuver transformed the German military into a direct instrument of Hitler’s will, binding officers morally and institutionally to the Führer. Even those who later plotted against him, such as the July 20 conspirators, struggled with the psychological weight of that oath [11] In effect, Hitler neutralized the military’s independence without mass executions, while Stalin destroyed his by them. Both approaches reflected the same authoritarian calculus: control the men with guns at all costs, even if national security is imperiled in the process.

References

[1] “Great Purge | History & Facts,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Purge, “Mikhail Tukhachevsky,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mikhail-Tukhachevsky, “Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_of_the_Trotskyist_Anti-Soviet_Military_Organization, and Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ (English translation, 1988), Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/isbn_0865273898.

[2] Interrogation of the accused Bukharin, Evening Session March 5,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1938/trial/1.htm and “Show Trials,” Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/show-trials/.

[3] Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (Oxford University Press, 1980). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/bukharin-and-the-bolshevik-revolution-9780195051036.

[4] A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election, DOJ Office of Inspector General (2018). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_General_report_on_FBI_and_DOJ_actions_in_the_2016_election

[5] “Federal probe of James Comey centers on 2020 Senate testimony,” ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/federal-probe-james-comey-centers-2020-senate-testimony/story?id=125935493

[6] The Intersection with Michael Popok, commentary on Comey indictment.

[7] Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (W.W. Norton, 2004).

[8] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford University Press, 1990).

[9] 1969 Libyan Revolution, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Libyan_revolution; Military Takes Charge in Libya, EBSCO Research Starters, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/military-history-and-science/military-takes-charge-libya; Fall of the Libyan Monarchy, CIA FOIA Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/fall-libyan-monarchy.

[10] Joachim Fest, Hitler (Harcourt, 1974).

[11] Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris (W.W. Norton, 1998).