Judge ruled DoJ engaged in ‘profound investigative missteps’ on way to indicting the former FBI director
Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick ruled on Monday that the justice department engaged in a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” on its way to indicting Comey. The federal judge directed prosecutors to produce to defense lawyers all grand jury materials from the case.
Fitzpatrick wrote that problems include “fundamental misstatements of the law” by a prosecutor to a grand jury that indicted Comey in September, the use of potentially privileged communications in the investigation and unexplained irregularities in the transcript of the grand jury proceedings.
“The Court recognizes that the relief sought by the defense is rarely granted,” Fitzpatrick wrote, adding: “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.”
Damn, maybe hiring someone just because she’s a good looking blonde woman isn’t the best option if you need a competent lawyer. Halligan has to be disbarred surely, everything she touches fails miserably and she obviously doesn’t have the slightest knowledge of her job.
That isn’t why she was hired. She was hired because she was willing to bring the case.
Just musing here.
Authoritarians think that they should have respect because they have a position. Not because they did the work to deserve respect.
In 2022, 89.5% of federal defendants pleaded guilty, and 0.4% were acquitted (source). The Trump Administration thinks you get those numbers just because you exist in the DOJ. As opposed to building a case for a long time and only going to trial when it’s already airtight.
Exactly. Willingness to do Trump’s bidding without question is the primary criteria.
Being blonde and sort-of attractive is a close second.
I encourage everyone to read the opinion, at least the fact findings. Because it is absolutely unhinged and insane. There are 11 separate findings of fact as to why Comey needs to see the grand jury materials. Here are some summaries:
- Nearly all of the presented evidence relies on search warrants from the Arctic Haze investigation (2019-2020). In the USA, search warrants specify the specific types of evidence to be seized, and the crimes they are searching for. These warrants were for some personal hard drives and email accounts of James Comey’s personal friend and attorney, Dan Richman.
- The warrants themselves said that the government was to go through the full forensic extractions and pick out data that was relevant to the investigation into classified data mishandling. The rest of the search data was to be thrown out. This was not done.
- The warrants said that attorney-client privilege data was to be separated out and thrown out. The first part was done, but not for the Comey-Richman privileged material, and in any case, the full extractions were retained, illegally.
- The warrants were to look for evidence of classified data mishandling, not evidence of lying to Congress. You can’t just take the data from one warrant and use it on another case. You need to get a new warrant for the new case, which wasn’t done. What happened here turns the warrants into “general warrants,” which King George III was infamous for using.
- The FBI agent (Agent 2) for this case was directed to review raw Cellebrite cell phone extractions, which were not supposed to be retained. While reading this stuff, he noticed that some emails between Comey and Richman appeared to be attorney client privilege material.
- Agent 2 passed some information from the Cellebrite to Agent 3 in a memo. Despite being tainted, Agent 3 went ahead and testified to the grand jury anyway.
- Halligan told the grand jury that Comey would be required to testify at trial to clarify things. This is absolutely wrong. Comey has the right to “take the fifth” and not testify at trial, and no adverse inference can be drawn if he chooses not to testify.
- Halligan suggested to the jury that her burden of proof at trial would something less than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” This is also a wrong instruction on the law.
- Halligan told the jury that she would have better evidence to present by trial time, and they could consider that promise when deciding whether to indict. This is wrong. The grand jury must make its decision based only on the evidence presented to it.
- And finally, the big kicker. There is a reasonable basis to think that the 2-count indictment that this prosecution is based on…the actual charging document…was never actually presented to the grand jury for an up-or-down vote. Instead, we think that the grand jury voted on the 3-count bill, rejecting count 1, and finding probable cause on counts 2 and 3. Then Halligan wrote a new indictment, renumbering 2 and 3 as counts 1 and 2, and got the foreperson to sign that, without holding another vote. This is, in the words of Judge Fitzpatrick, “unknown legal territory.” There’s no case law on this exact kind of screw-up.
They messed up so bad and it hasn’t even happened before in the history of law. A screw up of historical proportions. They don’t even know what to do, they can’t even comprehend how badly they fucked up.
It would be funny if it wasn’t such a serious matter.
Holy shit. This is either really egregious ineptitude or intentional persecution of a political “enemy” of Trump’s. I’m not sure which because Halligan is so deeply unqualified for her position. Maybe it’s both.
Wait
She lawyered so badly we don’t even have case law on it?
This scares me a lot. If she doesn’t get disbarred, and this somehow gets appealed, and it moves to the supreme court, then this right here could hand trump all of the remaining power the executive could want.
This is horrible
Each one of those bullet points is potentially a way for Comey to get his whole case thrown out. In addition to that, Comey has 4 other motions to dismiss pending right now, and they’re pretty good arguments. At this point, Comey has so many different ways to win, that it is really hard to imagine that he won’t win on one of them. (In which case he still has an entire trial to defend himself on).
The issue where there’s no case law is a pretty narrow one, I think: The grand jury voted to approve the words of the charges (except that the charge numbers were different), but not the specific piece of paper that the words ended up typed out on. Is that important for the formal charging process or not? Either way this gets decided, it won’t effect very many people, because any competent prosecutor will just re-run the new piece of paper past the jury to make sure. And it may not get decided at all if Comey’s case is dismissed on any of the other reasons.
EDIT: If it’s not true. If it turns out that the grand jury no-billed all three counts, then we’d be looking at a forged indictment. And that would be a serious crime.
A forged indictment would be weird.
And yet not much of a surprise.
Charges would be dismissed. An appeal to a higher court cannot happen if there’s no charges. Appeals happen after a verdict.
Right, and in general, it’s very hard for the prosecution to appeal the case, anyway. Can in some rare circumstances, but generally, they have one shot at things. That’s why the DOJ usually moves so slowly on everything. They build a very, very airtight case before they even start the grand jury process.
You’ve heard of competence porn. Now we’ve got incompetence porn.
Ahhhhh. Ok. That’s the secret sauce I was missing.
Thx for the summary
Cue the inevitable MAGA death threats to that judge.
I’m sure those started when the judge was first assigned
And the Supreme Court ruling that it’s A-OK as long as a Republican does it.
This is worth a read. The prosecutor literally tried to imply that pleading the 5th is evidence of guilt to the jury. The judge shoulda thrown him out of court immediately
That should be grounds for discipline, but IME, you have to piss off a disciplinary board personally to ever see consequences for attorney misconduct.
Yes, but if Rudy Giuliani’s disbarment is evidence of anything, brazenly defrauding the legal system for political purposes can have that effect. Much like Comey’s claim being one that rarely succeeds, I think we’re in the realm of possibility where rare things may well happen
Yeah Richard Lebowitz is a good example of how many second chances are extended for lawyers, it’s shocking. Leonard French has a series of all of the complaints against him.
The federal judge directed prosecutors to produce to defense lawyers all grand jury materials from the case.
This does not happen very often, I don’t think.
It almost never happens. Grand jury materials and transcripts are secret. A defense attorney has to climb a very large hill to get access to any of these materials.
Considering that, apparently, Halligan told the grand jury that there would be more evidence next week and to indict on that.
I get the need for secrecy here, but seriously, we need someone in the room keeping not-legally-appointed prosecutors from just straight up abusing the trust they’ve been given.
Are judges not involved in the grand jury process at all?
Nope. It’s a prosecutor’s wet dream. I’ve been inside of one, and the only folks in there are the grand jury members, the prosecutor (and any of his staff needed), and whoever they call to testify. Usually one of the grand jury members took notes for the proceedings where I was, but perhaps in a more populated area they have a court stenographer for it, seeing as this grand jury seems to have pretty detailed recordings.
That’s wild
Apparently not. I found that out yesterday, lol.
Wait. Pissing off Donnie isn’t an actual crime? Well I’ll go blow Bill Clinton.
Typical Trump administration hiring the “best” of the worst, which means the “worst” of the worst.
