Uh Oh, Sounds Like Lindsey Halligan Botched Comey Case Bigly With Bad Court Thingies!

But she seemed like such a competent young lady.

Lindsey Halligan, Esq.

Womp womp, the prosecution of James Comey is now swirling the drain, after Eastern District of Virginia one-woman clown car and acting US Attorney Lindsey Halligan flipped her hair like on Baywatch, sang “I’ve Gotta Be Me” and then did really bad law things. What do you know, turns out the former two-time loser for the Miss Colorado crown/insurance company lawyer/one of Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyers for in his documents-in-the-shitter case/lady who has never prosecuted a case before is not good at lawyerin’!

But she is who Lord Emperor President Donald J. Trump decreed to PAM on his shitty website that was to prosecute James Comey and Letitia James in EDVA, after the first prosecutor Trump picked, Erik Siebert, would not do it, and the statute of limitations clocks were a-ticking. And so it came to be.

But, tsuris. Halligan’s appointment may be illegal to begin with, and US District Judge Judge Cameron Currie (she/her) of South Carolina is still mulling over that question. An important one, because Halligan was the only person to sign off on those two cases, after everybody else in her office refused and then got fired or quit. Oh hey, remember when Judge Aileen Cannon tossed the entire documents-in-the-shitter case against Trump because she decided appointing special counsels was illegal? Good times!

Anyway, worried the cases might get tossed a la the Alina Habba/Bill Essayli situation, Pam Bondi went back and retroactively, a month later, appointed Halligan “special attorney,” and retroactively ratified her cases, claiming that she’d checked all of Halligan’s work and signed off on it herself. But Judge Currie is skeptical of that, too, because the grand jury materials turned over to her in the Comey case had a gap between 4:28 and 6:40 p.m. and certain remarks were missing from it, so how could Bondi have reviewed what wasn’t there?

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Pam Bondi Puts Sticker On Lindsey Halligan’s Head That Says 'Real Lawyer'

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Halligan first blamed the court recorder for the gap and provided a new transcript, then later claimed that the time was not missing, but there are still questions.

Including now some from US Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick, about the gap but also a whole lot more. He’s even demanded that Halligan and the government hand over grand jury materials to Comey’s defense team because Halligan done fucked up so bad. That is WILDLY unusual. But that’s how smelly it all smells! Judge Fitzpatrick’s whole 24 pages are a scathing read, if you are into that kind of thing.

The highlights: the judge accused the prosecution of actively misleading the grand jury about what the law was, bigly, telling them something along the lines of, it’s okay if there is not enough evidence in there, because at trial James Comey will HAVE to testify, and he can prove his innocence then! Any fifth graders in here want to tell the class what is wrong with that statement?

Also there’s the monkeyshines of the TWO indictments, in which the government learned that the jury was going to reject a count, and so the government repackaged the counts for the jury, came back seven minutes later with another signed indictment, and then published two to the case docket, both signed by Halligan and the foreperson, one with the dropped third count, and one without! Halligan claims she had no contact with the grand jury after it started deliberating, so how did it get two different bills to sign? And did she present and explain them both? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And then there’s the very toxic-sounding tree of evidence that fruited this exercise. Last month the government requested a filter team to go through materials it had seized in 2019 and 2020 from Comey’s lawyer, Daniel Richman, as part of an earlier, separate investigation, Bill Barr’s Arctic Haze. Comey has already been investigated A LOT! And while Halligan and her genius team asked Richman if anything they took was attorney-client privileged, they never asked Comey, actual target and the client holding the privilege, not the lawyer, derp.

And none of that is how it works. Government lawyers can’t just rummage through old materials from five-year-old cases in a lawyer’s files, fishing for crimes to charge different people with, with no new warrant. But that is exactly what Bondi’s DOJ appears to have done.

And when the judge asked the assistant US attorney how the office separated out what might apply to this case, the government’s lawyer said he did not know. So the judge ordered the prosecution to turn over everything they’d seized from there, and seal the rest. And then the defense claimed a lot of that material went missing.

Judge Fitzpatrick: “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.”

Probably they did this because, the judge noted, they were running out of time for things like warrants and filter teams, with the statute of limitations expiring in days. Sounds like he’s got their number. And yet after hurrying so fast to file charges, the government then sat on its ass and waited almost three weeks to ask the court to approve any kind of a filter protocol.

Once in front of a grand jury, said Fitzpatrick, the government’s case entirely rested on the materials it had warrantlessly fished through, and its only witness, FBI “Agent 3,” referred to these materials in their statements.

Then there’s allegations of CRAZY elementary misstatements of the law: Halligan told jurors that SHE, the prosecutor, should be considered their legal adviser. And then she told them something along the lines of that the burden was on James Comey to prove he was innocent, and he would be forced to testify in his own defense at trial to explain away the evidence. And she assured the grand jury that at trial there would be better evidence, and that they could use that imaginary better evidence when deciding whether or not to indict this ham sandwich.

And there’s that hinky business with the indictment itself. At 6:40 the grand jury returned a no-bill on one of three counts. But then at 6:47 Halligan presented a second draft! Noted the judge,

The short time span between the moment the prosecutor learned that the grand jury rejected one count in the original indictment and the time the prosecutor appeared in court to return the second indictment could not have been sufficient to draft the second indictment, sign the second indictment, present it to the grand jury, provide legal instructions to the grand jury, and give them an opportunity to deliberate and render a decision on the new indictment.

Did she use tracing paper? Halligan’s earlier explanation to another magistrate judge, Lindsey Vaala (yes, also a Lindsey with an e!), was feeble at best:

LINDSEY HALLIGAN: So I only reviewed the one with the two counts that our office redrafted when we found out about the two — two counts that were true billed, and I signed that one. I did not see the other one. I don’t know where that came from.

JUDGE VAALA: So your office didn’t prepare the indictment that they…

HALLIGAN: No, no, no — I — no, I prepared three counts. I only signed the one — the two-count (indictment). I don’t know which one with three counts you have in your hands.

JUDGE VAALA: Okay. It has your signature on it.

HALLIGAN: Okay. Well.

Didn’t know where it came from? Sounds like Pam Jo Bondi should have kept a closer eye on her charge!

And all kinds of similar questions will surely come up in the case against Letitia James, too. Was Halligan even appointed legally in the first place? Then did the government do some alleged misconduct there also, like “Little Trump” Bill Pulte — yikes, how little can one man be? — perhaps rummaging through James’s mortgage records without a warrant? They will just be asking! Will the government produce its “vindictive prosecution” discovery materials like it’s supposed to? Did Halligan also tell that grand jury some wacky shit to squeeze out that weak one-count indictment? Oh, Lindsey Halligan, you are over your skis and going headfirst down the slalom now!

Anyway, after Halligan’s PROFOUND mistakes, now James Comey and his lawyers will get to get to see ALL of the grand jury materials, unless Halligan is somehow able to make some go missing, and we can’t imagine a reason not to believe they might try. The judge atop the case, US District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, has stayed Judge Fitzpatrick’s order and given the government until tomorrow at 5 p.m. to state objections, and Comey until Friday at 5 p.m. to respond.

Oops, Bondi’s vindictive persecutions are backfiring bigly! At least Trump can be comforted with the satisfaction of knowing he’s forcing James, Comey and his other targets to spend thousands of dollars and hours of their lives trying to defend themselves!

The balls on these clowns.

[NBC / Emptywheel]

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