Washington: And so it begins.

The indictment of former FBI director James Comey is surely only the start of US President Donald Trump’s long-promised campaign of retribution against his enemies: a lengthy and varied list of people who will feel uneasy as they go to sleep tonight.

In the president’s defence, you can’t say he ever hid his intentions.

Donald Trump’s preoccupation with former FBI director James Comey has never faded.Credit: Matthew Absalom-Wong

Comey, who handled the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia in 2016, was sacked by Trump in 2017. The following year, less than halfway through his first term, the president was pushing for the Justice Department to lay charges.

“James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR,” Trump ranted on Twitter, as it was then known, in April 2018. “He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH.”

Trump went on to call Comey a “weak and untruthful slime ball”, and a terrible FBI director who botched the investigation into former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails.

In August of that year, Trump took aim at Jeff Sessions, tweeting that the then........

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