In a small open-air cafe off Moi Avenue in Nairobi, the morning radio usually hums with news of fuel prices, the latest debt restructuring talks with the International Monetary Fund, and the price of maize. But every few months, the broadcast is interrupted by some fresh dispatch from the marbled hallways of Washington, DC, delivered with breathless urgency. This week, patrons had to listen to the news that James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is facing federal charges once again, this time over disclosures dating back to the bitter American election of 2016. The cafe patrons, waiting to see if their shillings will buy lunch tomorrow, generally listen in polite silence before returning to their tea. It is hard to care about the bruised egos of fallen sheriffs when your own community is fighting for survival against the economic currents those sheriffs helped protect.
The news itself reads like the latest installment of a long-running domestic melodrama. Comey, according to his legal team, has been indicted for a third time over allegations that he improperly disclosed classified material to reporters nearly a decade ago. For those who track the theater of American partisan combat, it is treated as a seismic clash over institutional norms and presidential vengeance. Yet to view this case solely as a courtroom showdown between a former spy chief and his political adversaries is to miss the entire architecture that made a man like James Comey possible in the first place.
For decades, the United States has dispatched diplomats, consultants, and law enforcement trainers across the Global South to preach the gospel of the rule of law. They arrive in capitals from Tegucigalpa to Jakarta with tidy slide decks explaining how independent judiciaries ought to operate, lecturing ministers on the evils of state capture, and conditioning development loans on strict adherence to institutional transparency. We are constantly instructed that our governments are fragile because of personalism, that our leaders lack the civic discipline to separate private grievance from public duty. Yet whenever the veil slips in the imperial core, we find the very same dynamic, stripped of its polish: a security state whose highest echelons weaponize classifications, leaks, and prosecutions against one another in an endless cycle of palace intrigue.
Consider what is actually at stake in these charges. Comey is not accused of orchestrating covert surveillance programs that swept up millions of ordinary civilians across the Global South, nor of shielding corporate extractors who rely on American intelligence to secure mining concessions in the Congo or lithium reserves in the Andes. He is accused of leaking notes to a legacy newspaper. In the American legal ledger, the machinery of state violence and economic coercion is perfectly legal and vigorously defended; the only unforgivable transgression is when members of the inner circle reveal the private squabbles of power without authorization.
Ask any activist in Honduras or West Papua about what classified information means to them. To Maria, a land defender I spoke with in northern Guatemala two years ago, state secrecy was not an abstract legal concept; it was the blanket of official silence that prevented her community from discovering which foreign corporations held concessions to divert their river. For decades, peoples across the Global South have pleaded for Washington to declassify its historical records—the cables that authorized military coups, the memos that sanctioned structural adjustment, the files that recorded the deaths of dissidents. Those requests are routinely denied under the solemn mantle of national security. Yet when an elite insider jots down memos in an executive suite, the security apparatus readily turns itself inside out, consuming millions of taxpayer dollars to decide which faction gets to claim moral superiority.
This is why the spectacle of James Comey’s indictment feels so profoundly hollow when viewed from the periphery. It is not an exercise in justice or democratic accountability. It is an internal housekeeping dispute among the managers of global hegemony. Whichever side wins the day in court, the underlying priorities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the wider American national security establishment will remain entirely unchanged. The military bases will remain open, the foreign surveillance pipelines will remain active, and the sovereign debt obligations enforced by Washington’s financial institutions will continue to squeeze public clinics in the South.
There is a tragic irony in watching an empire become so thoroughly captivated by its own procedural feuds. While American elites trade indictments over decades-old press leaks, the rest of the world is wrestling with the brutal consequences of climate breakdown, unpayable sovereign debt, and resource theft. We are asked to hold our breath and pick a side in their courtroom dramas, as though the outcome might liberate us. It will not. True justice does not arrive when the powerful begin devouring each other behind closed doors; it begins only when the people they have spent generations ignoring finally get to write the rules.