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In the Oval Office today, asked about Jimmy Lai — the 78-year-old Catholic publisher of Apple Daily, now serving year five of a twenty-year sentence in a Hong Kong maximum-security prison — Donald Trump compared him to Jim Comey.

“It’s like saying to me, ‘If Comey ever went to jail, would you let him out?’” the president told reporters, on camera. “That might be a hard one for me, because he’s a dirty cop.”

Trump caught himself — “But Jimmy Lai isn’t that way” — yet the analogy itself, equating Xi’s grip on Lai with his own pursuit of Comey, hands Beijing the framework it has used to justify Lai’s imprisonment all along.

Then, asked about Lai himself, Trump offered this assessment: “He caused a lot of bedlam… he caused lots of turmoil for China. He tried to do the right thing, he wasn’t successful.”

The vocabulary was Beijing’s. Those phrases — bedlam, turmoil for China — are the Chinese Communist Party’s case against Lai, recited by an American president three days before he flies to Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping.

Eighteen months ago, the same president sat for a Hugh Hewitt radio interview and made the opposite promise. Asked whether he would lean on Xi to free Lai if returned to office, Trump answered without hesitation: “100%, yes. I’ll get him out. He’ll be easy to get out.”

He has not gotten him out. Here’s the background.