On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hosted testimony on President Donald Trump’s nomination of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for the position permanently. Since he took over from Pam Bondi in April, Blanche has been busy. On April 14, he moved to vacate the convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A week later he held a press conference announcing an 11-count indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In May, he proposed a $1.8 billion fund to financially reward the president’s political allies.

By conventional measures, his record is not especially impressive. A district court recently pressed the Justice Department to explain why dismissing the convictions of men found guilty of crimes including seditious conspiracy would serve the public interest—an unusual obstacle to a typically perfunctory exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The $1.8 billion fund generated a bipartisan firestorm and was scrapped within weeks, while a federal court later ruled that it was the product of improper self-dealing. The SPLC indictment was so poorly constructed that prosecutors have already had to refile it.

The capstone of Blanche’s audition was an indictment announced this spring against former FBI Director James Comey—his second. The first case, brought by Bondi, charged Comey with lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding. The latest involves a photograph Comey posted of seashells arranged into the numbers “86 47” on a beach. “86” is restaurant slang for removing something from the menu. The department alleges the picture was a threat to kill the 47th president.

So far, the more revealing response to the Comey indictment has come from the right. “If the seashell thing is the best the DOJ has on Comey, we’re in trouble,” said radio host Glenn Beck. Andy McCarthy, a conservative former federal prosecutor, called the new charges “even more absurd than the previous.” “It doesn’t matter if you despise Comey,” wrote Billy Binion, a reporter at the right-leaning publication Reason. “The indictment is an embarrassment.” Jonathan Turley, a regular Trump defender, wrote for Fox News that he would “prefer to crawl into one of Comey’s conversational shells” than defend the prosecution. “However, here we are.”

The case does not seem designed to succeed. But Blanche’s nomination suggests that was never quite the point. What looks like prosecutorial incompetence is better understood as prosecutorial sycophancy: where the president’s subordinates compete to demonstrate loyalty in hopes of being personally rewarded. Charges are brought primarily to please. The audience is not the court, or even, for that matter, the political opposition. It’s the leader.

Sycophantic prosecutions are ancient. During the Roman Empire, informers brought charges against the emperor’s perceived enemies and were rewarded with gifts and political positions. The practice had a name—delation—and its corruption marked a shift from republican law in the Roman legal system toward an imperial one. These leader-pleasers—delatores—levied accusations of disrespect or threats that were often farcical. But the payoff required prostration, not seriousness. Under Tiberius, whose reign became associated with the practice, delatores prosecuted capital crimes like carrying a coin bearing the emperor’s image into a bathroom, or changing clothes near his statue.

The distinction is important, because delator logic operates differently from other political prosecutions. For one, subordinate........

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