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.

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.

The auto pen stuff too.

The discharge petition is just discharging a resolution that amends the Epstein stuff as a rider onto a regular bill.

So even if everything passes the House, the Epstein provision still has to complete the rest of the Schoolhouse Rock process:

• Pass in the Senate
• Survive conference committee
• Re-pass both chambers
• Trump veto
• Veto override on 2/3 votes in both chambers

They pick out the small chickens to go to the rotisserie. The chickens for sale raw are substantially heavier on average.

Yeah. That’s only like 3 tractor trailers (assuming they’re not just running overweight too)

As many times as you want, at least until the auto-pen breaks.

I’m pretty sure some of their flights out of DCA were moderately delayed. It was horrific!

Federal employees will get back pay if that provision is in a bill that Congress will eventually pass. It’s not a guarantee, as you stated.

It is likely that any tests will be conducted in enclosed underground silos in Nevada. The site to do that has been maintained at some amount of readiness since the last test in 1992.

Nixon was at 31% when he resigned. Dubya also hit the low thirties, but he didn’t resign.

No, it’s clearly the fault of the guy that got shot. That’s why he’s been criminally charged.

(/s but not on the criminal charges. Those are real.)

UPDATE: As the deadline expired today, the prosecution dropped this motion which discloses that they searched an attorney’s phone with a warrant.

Because the stuff on this phone is a landmine of attorney-client privilege, they contend, there must be a complicated and lengthy clean room-style process to sort the privileged stuff from non-privileged.

Comey disagrees and wants to challenge the search warrant first.

I strongly suspect they didn’t actually turn over much of anything today, but we shall see.

In many jurisdictions, courts will allow prosecutors to “remedy” slipups to some degree by delaying the trial date, allowing the defense the same time they would have had to prepare, or at least an adequate time.

It definitely seems like that is not going to happen in this district.

There’s a bunch of complicated case law about missed disclosures and late disclosures.

I care about the guy now. Because I care about the rule of law. I want real trials in my country, where defendants confront the evidence against them fairly. Not show trials and Col. Cathcart “we can’t tell you who Person 3 is” bullshit.

You missed “CM,” which was common in copyright statements in the 20th century.

Comey’s attorney told the judge he has plans to bring 4 separate motions to dismiss the case, on 4 separate grounds.

• selective and vindictive prosecution
• Lindsey Halligan was not properly appointed as the US attorney, so she has no authority to charge the case.
• Abuse of grand jury, i.e. the indictment is invalid because the Halligan violated the very loose rules that exist when presenting the case to the grand jury.
• outrageous government conduct. Who knows what that is.

I was surprised he didn’t move to dismiss right there at the arraignment for failure to state an offense.

The prosecutors said they have a bunch of classified evidence they have to sort through. The judge did not like that. There’s no reason for anything to be classified in this case. Comey’s alleged lie was in public to Congress on CSPAN. And he was talking about unclassified stuff.

So this classified documents stuff seems to be a delaying tactic, because these guys have no idea what they’re going to do with discovery. And I’ve heard that eastern district of VA is called the “rocket docket” because the judges like to move fast. They don’t like delays.

Congress has to pass a budget bill to reopen the government, and the President has to sign it into law. If that bill says that the workers are entitled to back pay, then they are entitled to back pay.

BUT this time her own children are facing the premium hikes. That makes everything totally, completely different.

Just for context, almost every federal court is a branch of a state court.

This is not true at all.

Federal courts are part of the judicial branch, not the executive branch. So they don’t shut down when the executive branch “shuts down”, because the shutdown laws don’t apply to them. As a practical matter federal courts can keep running for a while using saved up court fee revenue. They will eventually run out of that money and gave some tough choices about what to do.