More than a hundred former Justice Department officials and 13 scholars of authoritarianism have thrown their weight behind former FBI Director James Comey, asking a judge to throw out the Trump administration’s criminal charges against him.

In an amicus brief reportedly filed in federal court in Virginia Monday, former federal prosecutors ranging from Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder to George W. Bush nominee Peter Keisler backed up Comey’s argument that the prosecution is “vindictive”.

It comes after Comey’s lawyers accused the Department of Justice last week of “singling him out” for prosecution due to what they said was President Donald Trump’s “personal spite” and “animus” over Comey’s constitutionally protected criticism of the president.

“Taken together, the totality of these circumstances indicate that the indictment of [Comey] was not an exercise of the evenhanded judgment of a disinterested prosecutor, acting free from personal bias, partisan animus, or divided loyalties — as is required by the Constitution and the Department of Justice’s formal policies,” read Monday’s filing, according to The Washington Post.

“Instead, it represented an act of personal retribution by the President, acting through a United States Attorney whom he had recently selected.”

Lawyers also filed a separate Amicus brief on Monday representing 13 scholars of authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, including the famed “end of history” theorist Francis Fukuyama.

“As we have seen in the countries we study, the misuse of the justice system to punish political adversaries undermines the rule of law and damages democratic governance,” they wrote.

“Here, publicly available evidence demonstrates Mr. Comey was targeted for prosecution based on improper animus, and that other such vindictive prosecutions are already in the works.

“The Court should not ignore this broader context and the dangerous precedent this prosecution sets and grant Mr. Comey’s motion to dismiss the indictment.”

The former officials’ brief was not yet visible in court’s online documents system as of Monday night.

Federal prosecutors have charged Comey with obstruction and lying to Congress in 2020 in sworn testimony over his role in the Trump-Russia investigation four years before.

During the 2020 hearing, Comey said he stood by his previous testimony in 2017, in which he insisted that he had never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak to the press about the Trump investigation or his 2016 probe into Hilary Clinton’s emails.

The DOJ’s indictment claims that this was a lie but has presented little firm evidence in court. The charges came after multiple prosecutors had reportedly determined that the case didn’t have legs.

That led Trump to to finally replace them with his former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan. The indictment was signed by her and nobody else, which Comey’s lawyers say was highly unusual, and a grand jury in Virginia approved it with a majority of 14 to 23.

Comey has pleaded not guilty to both charges.

Samantha Bateman, one of the former DOJ officials behind the amicus brief, acknowledged that courts aren’t often persuaded by such documents and that vindictive prosecution is a high bar to meet.

But she told the Washington Post that she and her colleagues hoped the sheer weight of their expertise would help convince the court that such a judgement would be warranted in this case.