Trump’s Former Insurance Lawyer Fucked Up His Revenge Prosecution Of James Comey In So Many Ways

from the incompetent-leading-the-blind-leading-the-stupid dept

Yes, as I already wrote about, the indictment against James Comey was already thrown out due to Halligan’s improper appointment, but it’s also worth covering how badly she fucked up even if she had been appointed legally. These cases were destined for the dustbin no matter what, because Halligan had no idea what she was doing. Late last week just one example of that insanity came out in court.

The whole case hasn’t gone well with Halligan handling the prosecution. The indictment delivered to a federal judge contained noticeable errors, the most notable being a discrepancy between the number of criminal counts presented to the grand jury. The one Halligan delivered contained two different Count Two’s in the charges, with supposedly one of the three charges (even though only two are listed) approved for prosecution by the grand jury.

Halligan told the judge she had only seen and signed the less fucked up version of the grand jury indictment but the judge pointed out both versions given to her had been signed by Trump’s recently installed DOJ prosecutor.

Here’s how Halligan handled that:

“Okay. It has your signature on it,” [Judge] Vaala told Halligan, who responded, “Okay. Well.”

That was nearly two months ago. Two months later, nothing’s getting any better, smarter, or more competently handled.

A federal magistrate judge said on Monday that the criminal case against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, could be in trouble because of a series of apparent errors committed in front of the grand jury by Lindsey Halligan, the inexperienced prosecutor picked by President Trump to oversee the matter.

[…]

In his ruling, Judge Fitzpatrick said that when Ms. Halligan appeared — by herself — in front of the grand jury in September to seek an indictment accusing Mr. Comey of lying to and obstructing Congress in 2020 testimony, she made at least two “fundamental and highly prejudicial” misstatements of the law. He also pointed out that the grand jury materials he ordered her to turn over to him for his review this month appeared to be incomplete and “likely do not reflect the full proceedings.”

There’s more in the ruling [PDF] handed down by Judge Fitzpatrick, but nothing in there suggests Halligan didn’t fuck up repeatedly while (mis)handling this case. It also points out that Trump’s DOJ and FBI engaged in some possible misconduct when conducting searches of devices seized from Comey’s personal lawyer, Daniel Richman.

Not only did the DOJ not take steps to separate anything that might have been privileged communications between the attorney and his client, it is now (five years later) trying to use information obtained then to support the current case against Comey.

Here, the government was permitted to search all of the Richman materials but authorized to seize only evidence related to violations of 18 U.S.C. § 641 (Theft and Conversion of Stolen Government Property) and 18 U.S.C. § 793 (Unlawful Gathering or Transmission of National Defense Information), both markedly different offenses than those with which Mr. Comey is currently charged.

[…]

The government appears to have conflated its obligation to protect privileged information–an obligation it approached casually at best in this case–with its duty to seize only those materials authorized by the Court. This cavalier attitude towards a basic tenet of the Fourth Amendment and multiple court orders left the government unchecked to rummage through all of the information seized from Mr. Richman, and apparently, in the government’s eyes, to do so again anytime they chose. The Arctic Haze investigation was closed in September 2021, with no charges filed. The Richman materials sat dormant with the FBI until the summer of 2025, when the Bureau chose to rummage through them again.

While none of that is necessarily Halligan’s fault, if she were a seasoned prosecutor rather than just another Trump loyalist, she might have realized this evidence was possibly unusable and withheld it from her (and her alone) grand jury presentation.

But the rest of it is definitely her fault. As Anna Bower points out in her extremely informative Bluesky thread, Halligan tried to salvage an apparent mistake by the grand jury foreperson — a misplaced signature that made it look like no criminal charges were being forwarded — by getting a signature on replacement paperwork which would reflect the grand jury’s decision to indict Comey on Count Two (removing the original Count One rejected by the grand jury). This explains the new paperwork with two Count Two’s, but it certainly doesn’t explain why Halligan thought she could slide the edited paperwork past the court.

And that all adds up to a judge who was clearly fed up:

The Court recognizes that the relief sought by the defense is rarely granted. However, the record points to a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding. Therefore, in this case, “the Court has before it a rare example of a criminal defendant who can actually make a ‘particularized and factually based’ showing that grounds exist to support the proposition that irregularities may have occurred in the grand jury proceedings and may justify the dismissal of one or more counts of the indictment.”

Now, a rational president who desires to be represented by competent professionals would have already acted to replace this prosecutor and demanded answers from the FBI. This is not a rational president nor is it a normal presidency. The administration that has turned the concept of executive power into an absolute monster will sweep this loss under the rug with the rest of its losses while claiming the system it controls is somehow stacked against it. And it will, of course play well, with the GOP voting base, which loves nothing more than being told that everyone else but themselves are to blame for their personal failures.

Filed Under: doj, james comey, lindsey halligan, pam bondi, political prosecution, trump administration