Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, in her order Friday dismissing the most serious charge against Martha Stewart, that of securities fraud, noted that it is “rare” to see a case in which “the evidence of an essential element of a charged crime is ‘nonexistent or so meager that no reasonable jury could find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.'”

“This is such a case,” Judge Cedarbaum wrote. “The evidence and inferences the Government presents are simply too weak to support a finding beyond a reasonable doubt of criminal intent.” She wrote, “I have concluded that no reasonable juror can find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant lied for the purpose of influencing the market for the securities of her company. Another way of putting it would be that in order to find the essential element of criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt, a rational juror would have to speculate.”

We would have liked to see Judge Cedarbaum dismiss not just this count against Ms. Stewart, but all of them. But the judge is to be congratulated for removing from the list of counts against Ms. Stewart one that last week we called problematic. We had noted the assessment of the journalist and former lawyer Guy Lesser, who wrote on The New York Sun’s op-ed page with respect to this count that it was a sign that Ms. Stewart was “aggressively over-indicted” in an attempt by prosecutors to pressure her to accept a plea bargain.

The jury will have its chance in the coming days to assess the rest of the prosecution’s case. But given the rarity of what just happened — the United States attorney’s office bringing a high-profile case that a judge thinks isn’t even worth putting before a jury — it’s worth some investigation, once the trial is over, into how the case was brought. The federal official responsible for the error, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time the charges were brought, is James Comey, who is now the no. 2 official in the Justice Department. Senator Schumer, a member of the Judiciary Committee, gave Mr. Comey a thorough going over at the time of his confirmation as to how he’d handle the investigation into who leaked columnist Robert Novak information that disclosed the identity of an American intelligence officer. It seems to us that, once the Stewart trial is over, it would be a good time to haul Mr. Comey back before the Judiciary Committee, which could ask him for a thorough explanation of why he would have filed a criminal charge so “weak.”

Back in August of 2002, before Ms. Stewart was even indicted, our Colin Miner quoted a federal official speaking of political pressure to have her arrested publicly, in handcuffs, to illustrate the Bush administration’s tough posture against white-collar crime. “There are some people who would like her to be the Bush administration’s poster child,” the official said — this amid the heights of the press frenzy over Enron and investigation by the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, into Wall Street stock analysis.

It’d be a fine topic for bipartisan congressional investigation. Was there White House political pressure to press the case against Ms. Stewart — who donated more than $100,000 to the Democrats in 2001? Was the prosecutor who brought the flimsy charge rewarded with a promotion? Both parties have an interest in getting an answer — Democrats, whose job it is to keep the Bush administration honest and defend one of their own donors, and Republicans, who, as the traditional defender of free markets, have an interest in preventing ordinary business dealings from being portrayed as criminal behavior by overly aggressive prosecutors.