Former FBI Director James Comey, left, and New York State Attorney General Letitia James have been indicted by the Trump Administration amidst the president's vows of vengeance, thereby creating two of the most important federal prosecutions in recent American history.

The Justice Integrity Project has curated recent expert commentary and concluded that prompt pre-trial dismissals or jury acquittals are likely for both prosecutions based on weak evidence and serious procedural flaws by the Justice Department. 

 

Recent federal charges by the Trump-led U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) against two longtime officials identified as opponents are so flawed and abusive that the charges are likely to lead to prompt pretrial dismissive of the charges or jury acquittals, according to in-depth commentaries by leading experts.

The DOJ filed the charges in separate cases against former Trump FBI Director James Comey on Sept. 2 and against New York State Attorney General Letitia James on Oct. 8, with both cases brought by federal grand juries sitting in Alexandria, VA, located a short distance  across the Potomac River from Washington, DC.

The Justice Integrity Project (JIP) has closely followed the background circumstances of the cases for years, and also covered in Alexandria's  federal courthouse the Comey arraignment Oct. 8 before U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, above right, at a proceeding that Comey's family also attended.

They are shown below in a JIP photo after Comey's arraignment. They include the defendant's daughter Maureen Comey, below left, who was -- until her firing on July 16 -- a well-regarded career Justice Department prosecutor who had helped lead the investigation of sex traffickers and onetime Trump friends Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, below right, among other high-profile defendants.

The JIP project was founded in 2010 to report on such complex cases after this reporter, Andrew Kreig, was appointed as a senior fellow by Schuster Center for Investigative Reporting at Brandeis University in 2009 to research suspected political prosecutions by federal attorneys following the so-called U.S. attorney firing scandal of 2006.

News reports then indicated that at least eight presidentially appointed U.S. attorneys were fired in 2006 for their alleged failure to file weak cases against political targets and/or to protect allies of President George W. Bush's administration. But few news organizations possessed the resources to examine in depth that nationwide pattern whereby career-minded federal prosecutors kept their Justice Department jobs by indicting and then imprisoning political targets on flimsy evidence.

JIP -- which has operated independently of the now-closed Schuster Center for more than a dozen years and which expanded its mission to civic topics globally impacted by corrupt prosecutions --  endorses the expert conclusions summarized above about the Comey and James prosecutions. The basis for those conclusions are cited in more depth below, with the news reports and analysis divided into three major sections: 

• Selective or Vindictive (Political) Prosecutions Threatening Democracy
• Comey Prosecution: In Depth
• James Prosecution: In Depth

The Comey Case

James Comey, left, a former high-ranking Justice Department executive, served as the FBI's seventh director from 2013 until his termination in May 2017. 

President Trump for years has denounced Comey because of Comey's failure to provide personal loyalty to the president during the FBI's investigation of Russian interference during the 2016 presidential elections. Trump used his Truth Social Account, for example, to claim: 

“One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI”, and also saying the case is about “justice not revenge.”

Additionally, Trump wrote U.S. Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, right, a public message on his site Truth Social instructing her to take action because in his mind Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff are “all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to get done."

On Sept. 25, the Trump administration reshuffled the leadership of its federal district based in Alexandria and persuaded 14 members of a 23-member federal grand jury in Alexandria to indict Comey on one charge of making false statements during congressional testimony about the Russia investigation and one charge of obstruction.

Comey, a lifelong Republican until recent years (as have been all FBI directors since the bureau and its predecessor were created in the 1920s), promptly released a video vigorously asserting his innocence, and pleaded not guilty at his arraignment.

The James Case

Letitiia James, a Democrat, has served since  2019 as the 67th New York Attorney General following her 2018 election. The first female and first African American to be elected to that office, she led it in filing a civil suit against Trump that resulted in penalties and a fine of more than $400 million on findings of fraud his New York businesses and tax filings. A divided appeals court upheld Trump's liability but voided the penalty as excessive, pending appeals to New York's highest court. 

After pressure from Trump and an appointee who has been scouring federal mortgage records to find evidence against officials whom Trump opposes Trump's newly appointed interim U.S. attorney for the Alexandria-based Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) Lindsey Halligan, left, obtained a grand jury indictment of James on Oct. 9 accusing the defendant of one court of bank fraud and one false statement count regarding a mortgage James held on what she allegedly described as a second home in Norfolk, Virginia.

Authorities charged that James stood to save more than $18,000 over the life of the mortgage if it were a rental and investment property, not a "second home." 

Like Comey, James has vowed in a video statement and otherwise to prove her innocence regarding the charges, which the New York Times has reported as involving a home occupied by a grand-niece of James largely rent-free and visited by James several times per year. 

Also like the Comey case, a number of career prosecutors recommended against charging James because of weak evidence and serious procedural problems. In fact, so many prosecutors refused to participate in either the Comey or James charges that some were fired and/or refused to sign prosecution documents, thereby requiring the inexperienced Halligan to serve as lead attorney in court and be helped most visibly of two assistant U.S. attorneys (AUSAs) brought in from North Carolina specifically to answer court questions in the Comey arraignment last week so she would not have to do so, even though they were themselves brand-new to the case.

Rocket Docket Looms As Big Problem For Prosecutors

The unusual nature of the prosecution of the two cases (and any others expected to arise soon from Trump's revenge against those he calls his enemies or opponents) is becoming an especially dramatic high-stakes spectacle because the Alexandria federal courts apply a rare procedure, the so-called "Rocket Docket," whereby federal litigants are required to file speedy motions and otherwise conduct speedy trials in criminal cases.

Nachmanoff, the Comey trial judge, set Jan. 5 as the trial date, for example. He ordered also an aggressive schedule of pre-trial motions with first filing date of Sunday, Oct. 12, just four days after the arraignment and with other deadlines Oct. 13 and soon thereafter. These include filings on complex matters that might typically take a year or more to file and adjudicate.

Experts describe the speedy procedures in Alexandria's federal courthouse (shown at right in a JIP photo on the date of Comey's arraignment) as intended in part to resolve caseloads that might involve espionage or other important national security installations in the jurisdictions. The CIA is headquartered in nearby McLean, VA, for example, and works like other such agencies with many employees, contractors and others that populate the area.  

The general assumption in legal circles is that speedy schedules help prosecutors, who usually can take years to prepare their cases if necessary and draw on the Justice Department's vast resources of more than 100,000 employees while defendants might remain in the dark about specifics. Nationally, the DOJ's inherent advantages enable it to achieve a conviction rate of some 98 percent nationally of those charged. The vast majority of defendants seek plea deals or incur jury convictions. 

In this instance, however, experts describe the rapid process as likely helping the defendants.

One reason is that Comey and James are experts in trial preparation and related law enforcement procedures. Each also has retained expert defense counsel. Former federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, left, who led many high-profile prosecutions before his retirement, told Nachmanoff's courtroom that it was his "honor of a lifetime" to advocate for Comey in his case.

New York's Attorney Gen. James is represented by Abbe Lowell, right, whose clients have included Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and President Biden's son Hunter Biden. Lowell recently resigned from a national law firm to found a practice specializing in high-profile whistleblowers and victims of political prosecutions.

By contrast, Halligan practiced civil insurance law before helping defend Trump in a House impeachment action. She joined the White House during the current administration and received what has been described as an interim appointment from Trump to lead Eastern District of Virginia staff of some 200 attorneys when its leaders declined or otherwise proved reluctant to push forward against Trump's targets.

One leader who resigned was Erik Siebert, a career prosecutor of conservative background and the son-in-law of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, left, a Republican and conservative. Siebert's nomination also had been endorsed by Virginia's two U.S. senators, both Democrats. Siebert is shown above at center in an unrelated case, accompanied by Youngkin and Bondi.

The reluctance of Halligan's staff to assist her prosecution showed up visibly when the grand jury rejected one proposed count against him, and her paperwork was so sloppily written that the judge questioned her on why he had received two sets of grand jury paperwork, one mistakenly describing two different "Count Two" as charges.

Halligan's performance on the paperwork and in court underscored her inexperience and the implied reluctance of professional staff to proceed as normal in assisting their new boss with these prosecutions.  

More substantively, experts have opined that Halligan's staff will face a difficult time providing timely and persuasive responses to defense motions, particularly because the evidence against both Comey and James is regarded as so weak as to make convictions unlikely.

Conservative commentator Andrew C. McCarthy, right, promptly made that argument in a Sept. 26 column published by the National Review headlined The Indictment Against Comey Should Be Dismissed, arguing that the evidence against Comey was so weak that the judge should dismiss the charges before trial. 

On the same date, McCarthy's conservative colleague Ed Whelan published in the National Review a column arguing that the prosecution should be dismissed before trial on separate procedural grounds that invalidate the indictments of Comey, James and anyone else that Halligan prosecutes on the grounds that her appointment is invalid.

Whelan's column --  Was Lindsey Halligan Validly Appointed as United States Attorney? -- cites a 1980s Justice Department legal memo authored by future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, right, stating that a president cannot name two interim U.S. attorneys in a row, as Trump seemed to have done by appointing Halligan to succeed her predecessor Siebert without either Senate or local court confirmation.

Commentaries below provide a more in-depth analysis of these and related issues. The Justice Integrity Project is a paid subscriber to nearly all of the subscription services cited below, and highly recommends that our readers similarly support the commentators efforts as either paid or free subscribers.

Some of the analysis below is doubtless too detailed for general readers. But it is vital to the justice system that someone capably undertake such work and in a timely fashion.

As one pertinent example, the national security expert Marcy Wheeler, who holds a doctorate granted from the University of Michigan and blogs under the name "Emptywheel," published a column Oct. 12 that analyzed a legal filing submitted that same day, a Sunday, by the Comey prosecutors as their first submission in the case.

She opined that the filing showed that Justice Department prosecutors were stalling tactics on required discovery in a way likely to irritate the presiding judge as well as the defensein a Rocket Docket case, particularly because the judge had given a reasonably clearcut order one deadlines and the government's response Oct. 12 was more than two weeks after the indictment and just days before the first defense filing was scheduled. The missing information? Defense counsel were saying they still did not know who Comey supposedly instructed to leak information to the news media about the Russian interference probe. Not irrelevant to this is that two main widely suspected leakers, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Comey's friend Daniel Richman, a law professor, have each denied they said anything to the media on Comey's instructions or suggestion.

Wheeler noted also that the prosecution's first filing was so sloppily drafted by the two prosecutors imported from North Carolina that they managed to misspell the word "Carolina" on the government's signature page, as shown below. 

 

Anyone can make a typographical mistake. Yet this one seems to symbolize much more given the historic nature of the case and the serious questions about whether the prosecution is legally valid, just, fair or corrupt. As show below, expert commentators are already suggesting that the prosecutors involved may face legal sanctions for misconduct. 

  

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Selective or Vindictive (Political) Prosecutions and Threats To Democracy

Dec. 19

Lawfare, Why the Government Keeps Failing to Re-Indict Letitia James, Molly Roberts,right, Dec. 19, 2025. Prosecutors are satisfying the definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Not-really-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan and her ragtag team of prosecutors seem to have taken the old adage very literally: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

After their case against Letitia James was dismissed on the grounds that Halligan was improperly appointed, they attempted to indict the New York attorney general again in Norfolk—and again in Alexandria the following week. These efforts failed. (The possibility remains that the government may add another “try” to the time-worn saying on any given Thursday.)

This series of events invites the question: Why can’t the office Halligan is continuing to pretend to lead seem to earn a second true bill? After all, when Halligan presented to the first grand jury herself two months ago, she emerged victorious … for about a month, at least.

Arriving at a conclusive answer is impossible without seeing three separate grand jury transcripts. Informed speculation, however, is suddenly easier than ever.

That’s because the most recent grand jury, in Alexandria, made the unusual decision this week to present the indictment it rejected in open court, and U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter issued an order Dec. 15 denying the government’s request to keep those records sealed. A comparison of this failed indictment to the version from the original prosecution may help explain why the U.S. attorney’s office’s tenacity isn’t yielding results.

What’s Old Is New Again

The essentials of the two indictments are the same: alleged violations of the bank fraud law (18 U.S.C. § 1344) and a law prohibiting false statements to a financial institution (18 U.S.C. § 1014). To have committed a crime under these statutes, James would have to have knowingly made a false statement that was intended to deceive as well as either intending, or tending, to influence the decision of a bank.

The later indictment also focuses on the same property as the earlier—a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Norfolk on Peronne Avenue (though this is spelled alternately as “Peronne” and “Perrone” in the document, only the former of which corresponds to the spelling on Google Maps). The basic allegation of occupancy fraud carries over into this go-around, too. The government argues that James misrepresented herself to her lender, OVM Financial, when she indicated in mortgage forms that she would treat the property as a secondary residence.

And once again, a “Second Home Rider” is central to the case. This is a form Fannie Mae statement that bars borrowers from entering into “a timesharing or any other shared ownership arrangement” that requires them “either to rent the property or give any other person control over the occupancy or use of the property.” What was odd—or obfuscatory—about the initial indictment was that it never claimed that James breached that rule. It simply said she rented “the property to a family of (3),” implying that the terms of the rider weren’t honored, when really the rider explicitly allows short-term renting during the first year so long as the property remains under the borrower’s control and “available” for the borrower’s personal use.

The new indictment, similarly, zeroes in on the rider as the basis of one of its false statement counts. This time, it doesn’t mention rental to a family of three—probably because the family in question, as the New York Times reported shortly after the initial indictment, has turned out to be James’s own grandniece and her children, who appear to have lived in the house for years almost entirely rent-free. Indeed, when the indictment introduces the existence of the rider, it doesn’t mention rental at all; it merely says that James “never had any intention of occupying and using” the property “as a second home.”

This focus on occupancy frames the rest of the new indictment. But in this instance, it doesn’t resolve the old indictment’s central problem: There’s no evidence that James acted contrary to the rider’s specific requirements. And to have made a false statement to a financial institution, she would have to have actually stated or certified something false.

What’s New Isn’t Much Help Either

The most obvious difference between the revised indictment and its previous incarnation is the addition of another—third—count: also alleging false statements to a financial institution but based on a separate document.

That document is an “Affidavit of Occupancy” that James signed when applying for the loan. Assuming that affidavit is the same one the government eventually submitted as supporting documentation in the now-dismissed case, this allegation has bones even barer than the allegation regarding the rider. Next to the line, “Second Home: At least one borrower will occupy the property as a second home (vacation, etc) while maintaining a principal residence elsewhere,” James has ticked a box.

The indictment says that James’s checking of this box constituted a false declaration of her “intent to occupy” the property “as a second home…when in truth and fact…she never had any intention” of doing so. And, as with the rider, there is scant discussion of how exactly James failed to occupy the property as a second home. The relevant Fannie Mae guidelines more or less mirror the second-home rider—and they state that the borrower must occupy the property “for some portion of the year.”

The prosecutors suggest James didn’t occupy the property at all, pointing to Schedule E tax forms on which she indicates zero “personal use days.” They also reference reservations she made at hotels in the area. The New York Times, however, reports that James makes “regular visits” to the property—and the credit card receipts for hotel reservations the government produced while its abortive case was still active cover only a single week around the time of purchase.

But the government’s trouble is deeper than just this. Prosecutors not only need to show the willful violation of rules for secondary residences—they also need to show that those violations influenced the decision of a bank. And the shift in focus away from allegedly renting the property to allegedly failing to occupy it renders that task even trickier. The old indictment sought to meet the bar by avowing, based on the Schedule E tax forms, that James had received “thousand(s) of dollars in rents” and was therefore treating her home as an investment property. Lying about whether the home was an investment property might have influenced the bank—because a mortgage for an investment property would have carried a higher interest rate.

The new indictment doesn’t do that. Indeed, it dispenses with the “thousand(s) in rent” language entirely, perhaps because the Schedule E forms include only $1,350 in rents received and reveal a matching $1,350 in utilities paid. Read carefully, the Schedule E forms indicate that after taking into account mortgage interest, taxes and depreciation, James lost money on the property in 2020.

Yet the truth can hurt, and in this matter the indictment’s (relative) honesty may harm the government’s case in the eyes of a reasonable grand juror. After all, if this house wasn’t a second home, what was it—and how did James’s alleged misrepresentations of her occupancy of it influence the decision of a bank to issue a loan at a given rate? The government does eventually say the property would have been “accurately represented…as an investment property.” But, because this time around prosecutors didn’t include any facts even remotely suggesting James was profiting from her ownership, they haven’t come close to demonstrating that she viewed the house as an investment at all.

Prosecutors rely instead only on the Schedule E forms and New York financial disclosures. The Schedule E forms report income or losses from “rental real estate”; the New York disclosure forms instruct respondents not to list property that is their primary or secondary residence, and James has indicated that the general nature of the property is “investment.” These filings, however, don’t necessarily mean that the home wasn’t “available” for James’s use (as the second home rider requires) or that she did not use it “for some portion of the year” (as the affidavit of occupancy attests). Quite possibly, James was attempting to cross “i”s and dot “t”s by disclosing the origin of any income she was receiving that would otherwise be unaccounted for, rather than accidentally admitting to having defrauded a financial institution when she obtained her loan.

(The closest the indictment comes to catching James in anything that looks even a little like a lie is when it introduces an insurance policy James signed, not featured in the previous indictment, that indicated the total number of residents in the household including children would be one. But, besides the fact that James isn’t charged with insurance fraud, it’s unclear whether she would have been obligated to include the family members who eventually lived in her property as members of the economic unit that makes up her household. Arguably if the residents actually were tenants rather than household members, they should have obtained their own policy.)

Ultimately, the indictment betrays its lack of confidence in its own contention that the “Peronne Property” was legally an investment property—waffling over whether James was perpetrating a money-making ploy or doing a family member a favor by “secur[ing] a mortgage…that her family member could not have qualified for.” The latter would be illegal if the family member were secretly responsible for the home and the mortgage payments. But, as far as we know and apparently as far as the government knows either, the family member was not.

What’s the Story?

So why did Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Keller—who took charge of this case, including the presentation of the indictment to the grand jury, after the improper appointment debacle—fail not once, but twice now, to do what Lindsey Halligan in all her inexperience managed to do two months ago?

One possible explanation is random variance in the grand jury pool. Different grand juries have different grand jurors, and these latter grand jurors may have been less persuadable than the earlier ones, even though persuading 12 or so people of probable cause is notoriously, and historically, easy.

Another possible explanation resides in the indictment itself: This time, the government has done even less than last time to demonstrate that the house was anything other than a second home according to Fannie Mae’s malleable guidelines; or that Letitia James knew as much; or that any gap between her representations and reality had any influence on her lender’s decisions. And at least some of the reason it has done less may be that it feels more bound by normal procedure than it did last time.

The defense submitted a motion for the disclosure of certain grand jury materials in the since-dismissed case questioning whether Halligan may have “infected” the grand jury proceedings with “instructional error”—as the record shows she did in former FBI Director James Comey’s case. A grand jury in Norfolk originally heard testimony from the grandniece; but the grand jury that returned the indictment was seated in Alexandria, and the niece wasn’t asked to testify again. The inspector general for a key housing agency was ousted after he reportedly attempted to provide constitutionally required information to EDVA—suggesting there may have been exculpatory evidence that prosecutors should have but did not present to the Alexandria grand jury.

In other words, the case may look weaker this time around, because the case always was weaker but now the government is doing less to hide that weakness.

The final possible explanation: Grand jurors have been reading the news. In declining the government’s request to seal the rejected indictment after the grand jury presented it in open court, the judge said he wouldn’t speculate why the grand jury had taken that extraordinary step. But he also said that making the no bill public “serves the interest of transparency when an individual has already suffered the stigma of public criminal charges.” The grand jury—aware of President Trump’s efforts to punish a political opponent come hell, high water, or dismissal on the basis of improper appointment—may have thought along the same lines. It, or some members of it, may also have been aware of prior grand jury rejection of charges. And grand jurors may have been aware of the judicial dismissal of the previous charges.

The full explanation could be some combination of the above. But the inability of the Department of Justice to secure the retribution it has been ordered to seek suggests that trying, trying again doesn’t always lead to success. Sometimes, it just leads to repeated failure.

Nov. 26

 

FBI Director Kash Patel, a former congressional aide and podcaster who has advanced by floating conspiracy theories claiming that gangsters aligned with Democrats threaten America, as indicated by his investigations and book "Government Gangsters"  (shown below)

Emptywheel, Analysis: Did the Comey Dismissal Render Kash Patel’s Grand Conspiracy “Just Someone Else’s Fantasy?” Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Nov. 26, 2025. 

There’s something missing from all the analysis (and this, from Politico, is quite good --Politico, Lindsey Halligan is disqualified — but there are major questions about what comes next, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein) of what might happen in the wake of Judge Cameron Currie’s dismissal of at least the Jim Comey indictment, and possibly even the Letitia James one: the way the dismissal might help or hurt Trump’s plans to charge a Grand Conspiracy in Florida.

After all, if the ultimate goal was always to charge Jim Comey as part of some 20-person conspiracy indictment claiming a bunch of people arranged to have Donald Trump investigated as a ploy to undercut his first term and damage his 2024 election chances (yeah, seriously, that is the theory!), then the statute of limitations expiration was always a mere speed bump.

And in the same way that the dismissal without prejudice leaves unresolved the larger issue of illegal weaponization of DOJ, it also leaves a number of things the Loaner AUSAs might have wanted resolved unresolved.

Understand, two things that had no business being in the Comey indictment are absolutely critical to the Grand Conspiracy theory.

The Grand Conspiracy would start at least by August 9, 2016, when Peter Strzok responded to Lisa Page’s question, “He’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” by saying, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

From there, Kash Patel’s conspiracy theory about the “Clinton Plan” CIOL would take over.

Shown above in file photos: Former FBI Director James Comey, left, and 2016 Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton.

The Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory is that the “Clinton Plan” was real, and that it should have given the FBI notice that Hillary had a plan to frame Donald Trump. [I should emphasize, not only don’t I endorse this theory, much of it is false and even more of it is batshit insane, but it nevertheless is being pursued by a Senate-confirmed US Attorney in SDFL, Jason Reding Quiñones.]

But, the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory goes, when Peter Strzok got notice of the Clinton Plan on September 7, he made sure it never got shared with the people beginning to investigate why George Papadopoulos knew of Russia’s plan to help Trump in advance because, the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy goes, it would have led him to open an investigation into Hillary rather than Trump.

Again, not true, insane, but nevertheless what has everyone from the Deputy Attorney General and FBI Director on down to the people unlawfully accessing raw data collected years ago aroused.

Fast forward to 2020. According to the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory, when Jim Comey told Lindsey Graham the “Clinton Plan” — as misleadingly described in a John Ratcliffe letter no doubt drafted with Kash’s help — didn’t ring a bell for him, he was lying to cover up how the FBI ignored warning signs about leads from Hillary.

Fast forward even further to 2025. When Kash found a burn bag of materials that had not been destroyed, including the “Clinton Plan” CIOL that might have been brought to the FBI Director’s Office with a bunch of other Durham investigation materials, he and Jack Eckenrode instead assumed that Comey partisans were trying to protect Comey and Strzok’s devious plot to ignore the CIOL back in 2016.

You need the “Clinton Plan” CIOL for the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory because that’s what makes their wildly misleading claims about the treatment of the Steele dossier in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment damning. The Steele dossier should never have been used at all, the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory says, because the FBI had notice that Clinton wanted to frame Trump, but instead Comey, with Brennan’s involvement (the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory claims), demanded its inclusion and based (the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory claims) the judgment that Russia wanted Trump to win on it, and when Brennan lied about all that in 2023 (the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory claims), he was trying to cover up this devious plot.

You also need Comey’s decision to release the memo he wrote up memorializing Trump’s corrupt attempt to shut down the Mike Flynn investigation and with it the communications with Dan Richman. You need that, plus Comey’s overt wish that by releasing the memo a Special Counsel might be (and was) appointed, because it ties (the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory claims) Strzok’s stated intent to “stop” Trump from becoming President to the investigation that dominated his first term. The Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory turns the very legal release of a memo demonstrating Trump’s corruption into the crime of depriving Donald Trump of his right to fully exploit the presidency the Russian government gave him.

Now consider how charging Jim Comey with lying and obstructing fucked the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy plans.

First, the “Clinton Plan” CIOL.

EDVA successfully prevented Comey from explaining the problem with the “Clinton Plan” CIOL before attempting to charge him for lying about it. In his first discovery letter, Pat Fitzgerald noted that he had offered to meet with prosecutors on September 17.

In that regard, on September 17, 2025, I wrote the DOJ to ask for a meeting to discuss why the case should not be brought but never received a substantive response, much less a meeting.

And his motion to dismiss because Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer failed to actually get an indictment revealed that EDVA even refused to engage with the offer to toll the statute of limitations.

In fact, Mr. Comey’s counsel requested a meeting with the U.S. Attorney’s Office the week before the indictment was obtained and offered to toll the statute of limitations to allow for that meeting. A prosecutor in the Office told Mr. Comey’s counsel that the Office had been directed not to engage with defense counsel.

Prosecutors at EDVA — supposedly the good guys who got fired — didn’t want any truths Fitzgerald might share to fuck up their larger Grand Conspiracy conspiracy.

In one of his two replies for release of grand jury materials, Comey laid out how stupid all this is.

On September 30, 2020, Mr. Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into alleged links between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government. See Oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation: Day 3, Hearing Before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 116th Cong. (Sept. 30, 2020),. The night before, he was sent a copy of the Ratcliffe Letter, described above, which purported to summarize the September 7, 2016 CIOL in one sentence. Mr. Comey was not provided an opportunity to review the September 7, 2016 CIOL at issue prior to his testimony.

[snip]

There is no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Comey received the CIOL at issue, much less that he reviewed it. The materials in discovery make clear that every day, numerous CIOLs come to the FBI addressed to the Director—from a variety of federal agencies in a variety of formats—and are routed to employees other than the Director. Because the Midyear Exam investigation had been closed for more than two months, there is no reason to believe that any CIOL related to Ms. Clinton would have been sent to Mr. Comey (and the government has produced no proof that it was). There is no electronic trail showing that Mr. Comey received the CIOL at issue. There is no paper trail showing that he received it. And there is no witness who says that Mr. Comey either received it or discussed it with him. Full stop.

This total lack of evidence is extremely troubling in light of credible press reporting that not only does a declination memorandum exist in this case,11 but it made clear that with respect to the CIOL in particular, a prior investigation found that Mr. Comey’s statement could not support a false-statement charge because there was insufficient evidence Mr. Comey had ever seen the CIOL.12 Ms. Halligan was also reported to have been advised by career prosecutors in that declination memorandum that “seeking the charges would violate DOJ policy, raise serious ethics issues, and risk being rejected by the grand jury.” Id.

In a footnote, he noted that this is all based on Russian disinformation.

10 Indeed, it appears this information was created by Russian intelligence, and did not accurately reflect particular emails. See Charlie Savage & Adam Goldman, ‘Clinton Plan’ Emails Were Likely Made by Russian Spies, Declassified Report Shows, N.Y. Times (July 31, 2025), https://perma.cc/F8AF-TLAF.

Worse still, a grand jury determined there was not probable cause that Comey lied about the “Clinton Plan” CIOL (though the Loaner AUSAs were trying to backdoor that as a crime in the obstruction charge).

Todd Blanche whisked the criminal investigation into whether Brennan lied in 2023 about his enthusiasm for the Steele dossier away to SDFL before a prosecutor wrote up a declination memo. Having arrived in Florida, US Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones sent out a bunch of subpoenas that everyone recognizes to be entirely performative (because they ask for highly classified things none of the subpoena recipients would have in their private possession).

But Blanche didn’t whisk this “Clinton Plan” CIOL off to Florida (which might have happened had Trump not demanded Pam Bondi intervene) before Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer did real damage to it.

And by bringing in Loaner AUSAs who actually care about their bar licenses, Blanche also did grave damage to their plan to use the Comey memos in the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy. The Loaner AUSAs attempted (or rather, fronted for James Hayes’ attempt) to use this investigation to get a filter team approved to turn the clearly privileged materials Miles Starr and Jack Eckenrode could have read because Kash Patel’s FBI turned off the filters applied under Bill Barr into crime-fraud excepted communications, at least ostensibly because they reflected a conspiracy to leak classified materials but in reality to serve their larger Grand Conspiracy conspiracy.

But instead of getting their filter protocol, the EDVA effort resulted in an order from William Fitzpatrick prohibiting the government from reviewing those privileged materials.

ORDERED that the Government, including any of its agents or employees, shall not review any of the materials seized pursuant to the four 2019 and 2020 search warrants at issue until further order of the Court;

And then Fitzpatrick issued an opinion effectively holding that DOJ violated Comey’s attorney-client privilege in 2020 by not permitting him to assert privilege.

However, the government never engaged Mr. Comey in this process even though it knew that Mr. Richman represented Mr. Comey as his attorney as of May 9, 2017, and three of the four Richman Warrants authorized the government to search Mr. Richman’s devices through May 30, 2017, 21 days after an attorney-client relationship had been formed. ECF Nos. 38 at 2 and 138-11 at 33 (Aug. 2019 Office of the Inspector General Report) (noting that Mr. Comey informed the Office of Inspector General that “the day after his removal, or ‘very shortly thereafter,’ he retained attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald, David Kelley, and Daniel Richman.”).

[snip]

At the time the Richman Warrants were executed, the government was aware not only that Mr. Richman represented Mr. Comey, but also that he maintained ongoing attorney-client relationships with other individuals, as the FBI materials regarding his resignation from Special Government Employee status noted his intention to represent a defendant in a federal criminal prosecution. Id. As a result, when the government obtained the first Richman Warrant in 2019, it was clearly foreseeable that Mr. Richman’s devices contained potentially privileged communications with numerous third parties, including Mr. Comey. Nevertheless, in 2019 and 2020, the government made a conscious decision to exclude Mr. Comey from the filter process, even though Mr. Comey, as the client, is the privilege holder, not Mr. Richman. The government’s claim at the November 5, 2025 hearing that Mr. Richman, at the time himself the subject of a criminal investigation and represented by separate counsel, was in a position to effectively assert Mr. Comey’s privilege is entirely unreasonable.

Fitzpatrick noted that had prosecutors obtained a new warrant to investigate Comey’s alleged leaks, it would be narrowly scoped. (He doesn’t say this, but it is the case that a new warrant would have prohibited any searches after February 7, 2017, the day Richman left the FBI, and therefore prohibited the review of the Comey memo exchanges even on the Richman side.)

If a new warrant had been sought by the government and issued by the Court, the Fourth Amendment would have required it to be narrowly tailored, authorizing access only to materials within a limited time frame and relevant to the new offenses under investigation. See Williams, 592 F.3d at 519. In addition, any new warrant would have imposed strict procedural safeguards to ensure privileged information was not reviewed by the prosecution team. As a result, the parameters of the 2025 search would inevitably have had a different and much narrower scope than the Richman Warrants. Faced with this prospect, the government chose to unilaterally search materials that were (1) seized five years earlier; (2) seized in a separate and since closed investigation; (3) that were never reviewed to determine whether the seized information was responsive to the original warrants; (4) that were likely improperly held by the government for a prolonged period of time; (5) that included potentially privileged communications; (6) did so without ever engaging the privilege holders; and (7) did so without seeking any new judicial authority.

And he described that DOJ had permitted Miles Starr to remain on the investigative team even after having been tainted by privileged communications.

Agent-3, rather than remove himself from the investigative team until the taint issue was resolved, proceeded into the grand jury undeterred and testified in support of the pending indictment. ECF 179. In fact, Agent-3 was the only witness to testify before the grand jury in support of the pending indictment. Id. The government’s decision to allow an agent who was exposed to potentially privileged information to testify before a grand jury is highly irregular and a radical departure from past DOJ practice.

The Fitzpatrick opinion was absolutely devastating for the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy, because it rendered Comey’s side of the Comey memo exchanges unlawfully seized.

And then Donald Trump DOJ responded the way Trump always does, by claiming bias. The Loaner AUSAs made a specious claim that Fitzpatrick’s comments about Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s misstatements to the jury reflected bias.

Federal courts have an affirmative obligation to ensure that judicial findings accurately reflect the evidence. Canon 2(A) of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges requires every judge to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary” and to avoid orders that “misstate or distort the record.” Canon 3(A)(4) requires courts to ensure that factual determinations are based on the actual record, not assumptions or misrepresentations. Measured against these obligations and the rule of law, the magistrate’s reading of the transcript cannot stand.

And, that very same day, Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer, right, lied to the NYPost in a bid to claim that Michael Nachmanoff himself is biased.

Interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan suggested Wednesday that the Biden-appointed judge overseeing the criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey violated judicial conduct rules by asking if she was a “puppet” of President Trump.

District Judge Michael Nachmanoff asked Comey’s defense lawyer if he thought Halligan, the prosecutor who brought the indictment against the former FBI boss, was acting as a “puppet” or “stalking horse” of the commander in chief, during a hearing in an Alexandria, Va., courtroom.

“Personal attacks — like Judge Nachmanoff referring to me as a ‘puppet’ — don’t change the facts or the law,” Halligan exclusively told The Post.

By November 19, the day of these twin bullshit claims of judicial misconduct, the Comey prosecution in EDVA had done grave damage to the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy. But the plan was to discredit everything the judges did.

Except for Cameron Currie, above. They forgot to include Judge Currie, and her order dismissing the indictment without prejudice — making the indictment and everything that happened after that a legal nullity — left all of this wildly unresolved.

DOJ is on notice that they broke the law and that their Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theories are bullshit. But that notice has become a legal nullity, with no way for them to rebut it in EDVA.

I can tell you what the plan was. It was (as Charlie Savage recently laid out) to whisk this all away to Aileen Cannnon’s courthouse to make the crimes FBI committed go away.

I have no fucking clue what the plan is now, because I have no idea what the legal import is of these legal statements that have been rendered a legal nullity by the Currie order.

I do know, however, that when imagining what might come next, you have to consider that SDFL investigation, which may be why Comey’s statement predicted that, “I know that Donald Trump will probably come after me again.”

Update: In somewhat related news, the 11th Circuit has upheld the judgment and sanctions against Trump and Alina Habba for their frivolous lawsuit very much paralleling the Grand Conspiracy theory.

Meaning, Jim Comey has beaten Trump in court twice in a holiday-shortened week.

Nov. 24 

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge Tosses Criminal Charges Against James Comey and Letitia James, Charlie Savage, Nov. 24, 2025. Where Things Stand 

A federal judge on Monday tossed out separate criminal charges against the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, saying the loyalist prosecutor installed by President Trump to bring the cases was put into her job unlawfully.

The twin rulings, by Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, above, were the most significant setback yet to the president’s efforts to force the criminal justice system to punish his perceived foes.The case dismissals also served as a rebuke to Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had rushed to carry out Mr. Trump’s orders to appoint the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The dismissals, while embarrassing for the White House and the Justice Department, are unlikely to be the last word on an issue of constitutional authority that many legal experts expect could be appealed to the Supreme Court. And the way Judge Currie rendered her decision left open the possibility that another prosecutor could refile the charges against both Mr. Comey and Ms. James.

Judg Currie’s orders center on Mr. Trump’s unorthodox decision to appoint Ms. Halligan to her prosecutorial position in an interim capacity, replacing his previous pick, who was also serving in a temporary role. Within days after assuming her new post, Ms. Halligan rejected the advice of the career prosecutors in her new office and moved single-handedly to indict both Mr. Comey and Ms. James, two of the president’s most reviled targets.

In her rulings on Monday, Judge Currie said that it was unlawful to appoint two interim prosecutors in succession, and dismissed the charges against Mr. Comey and Ms. James without prejudice.

That meant that the government could try to refile the charges, whatever the outcome of the ultimate legal fight over the appointment of Ms. Halligan, a former White House staffer and personal lawyer to Mr. Trump.

The administration is also likely to appeal the judge’s ruling, rather than acquiesce to the death of two high-profile cases just weeks after the president demanded they be brought.

A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ms. James’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said the court ruling showed Mr. Trump “went to extreme measures to substitute one of his allies to bring these baseless charges after career prosecutors refused. This case was not about justice or the law; it was about targeting Attorney General James for what she stood for and who she challenged.”

Judge Currie’s ruling stems from a series of machinations that Mr. Trump undertook earlier this fall.

In late September, he rushed to oust Ms. Halligan’s predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, the career U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia who had expressed concern that there was not sufficient evidence to indict Mr. Comey and Ms. James. The president then replaced Mr. Siebert with Ms. Halligan who had no previous experience as a prosecutor.

When Ms. Halligan did the president’s bidding by hurrying to charge Mr. Comey and Ms. James, it was a generational erosion in the tradition of the White House keeping distance from the affairs of the Justice Department.

The indictment she secured against Mr. Comey charged him with lying to and obstructing Congress during testimony he gave in September 2020 about whether, as F.B.I. director, he had authorized leaks to the media about sensitive political investigations. Not long after, Ms. James was charged with bank fraud and making false statements in loan documents for a home she had purchased in Norfolk, Va.

Ms. James said in a written statement that she was “heartened by today’s victory and grateful for the prayers and support I have received from around the country.”

The timing of the Comey indictment, and the manner in which the judge dismissed it, could now lead to a legal fight over whether the government can try to refile the charges with another grand jury.

Mr. Comey was indicted just days before the five-year statute of limitations was set to run out on any charges stemming from his congressional testimony. His lawyers, and a magistrate judge, have said the statute has now expired, meaning charges could not be refiled.

Government prosecutors, however, have argued in court that the statute has not expired, because the clock was essentially paused when the indictment was returned.

Judge Currie said that Mr. Trump and his attorney general, Ms. Bondi, had circumvented the law through the manner in which Ms. Halligan was elevated to oversee one of the country’s most important federal prosecutors’ offices.

The judge noted that both Ms. Halligan and Mr. Siebert had been serving in an interim capacity.

But the attorney general is permitted to appoint only one interim U.S. attorney to serve for a temporary 120-day period, Judge Currie noted. The law does not permit the appointment of successive interim prosecutors, the judge said, or else the White House could simply keep installing pliant people in powerful positions and get around the constitutional requirement for the Senate to confirm them.

Judge Currie wrote that if she did not dismiss the indictments, the consequences to the criminal justice system would be enormous.

“It would mean the government could send any private citizen off the street — attorney or not — into the grand jury room to secure an indictment so long as the attorney general gives her approval after the fact,” she wrote. “That cannot be the law.”

Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Chicago, said the judge’s rulings were not particularly surprising for most lawyers.

“The rationale the judge puts forward as to why this was an unconstitutional appointment is pretty sound; it’s just logic,” he said. Mr. Cotter said dismissing the charges “without prejudice,” meaning the charges could be refiled with another grand jury, gavde prosecutors options to try to revive the cases.

“Under current federal law, when an indictment is dismissed, the government has six months to try to refile charges, and it may be even longer because of appeals,” he said.

Mr. Cotter said the rulings would probably put on hold other legal fights over whether the James and Comey cases were vindictive prosecutions of political foes.

Judge Currie, an appointee of President Bill Clinton who normally sits in South Carolina, was assigned to hear the question of Ms. Halligan’s appointment after the local federal judges were forced to step back to avoid any appearance of conflict in deciding on the fate of the U.S. attorney they routinely deal with.

Other federal judges have already ruled that Mr. Trump’s Justice Department unlawfully used similar procedural maneuvers to put loyalists in place at three other U.S. attorney’s offices. Those include Alina Habba, who was put in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey; Sigal Chattah, who was named the acting U.S. attorney for Nevada; and Bilal Essayli, whom Mr. Trump put in the top job at the U.S. attorney’s office in the Central District of California.

But Ms. Halligan’s involvement in the James and Comey cases was in many ways unique. In both matters, she appeared alone in front of the grand juries that returned indictments and was the sole prosecutor to have formally signed the charging documents. Because no other colleagues joined her in presenting to grand juries, Judge Currie ruled that the indictments she secured were invalid.

Although the charges against Mr. Comey and Ms. James were brought separately, their lawyers joined forces in challenging Ms. Halligan’s appointment.

Politico, Lindsey Halligan is disqualified — but there are major questions about what comes next, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, Nov. 24, 2025. Here’s a look at the most pertinent questions following the dismissal of the cases against James Comey and Letitia James — and what might come next.

The criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James are gone — for now. But a federal judge’s decision to dismiss the indictments and eject the lead prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, raises a long list of questions about what comes next.

U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie concluded that Halligan’s appointment by Attorney General Pam Bondi to lead the federal prosecutors’ office in the Eastern District of Virginia was illegal. And because Halligan was the only prosecutor to sign off on the Comey and James prosecutions, Currie ruled that the cases must be dismissed.

A grand jury indicted Comey in September on charges that he lied to Congress in 2020 when discussing media leaks related to the FBI’s investigation of President Donald Trump and his links to Russia. James, who sued Trump in a massive civil fraud case in 2022, was indicted two weeks later on mortgage fraud charges. Both claimed they were targeted by Halligan — Trump’s former personal lawyer — to carry out Trump’s personal vendetta against them.

Judges in each case were weighing those “vindictive prosecution” concerns before Currie shut down the cases Monday over Halligan’s legitimacy.

But Currie also left a window for prosecutors to try again. And Comey made clear in a video that he expects to be targeted anew by Trump and his allies at DOJ.

Here’s a look at the most pertinent questions following the dismissal of the two politically charged cases and what might come next.Will the Justice Department re-indict Comey or James?

DOJ has not yet said whether it intends to pursue new indictments of either Comey or James — and if so, which prosecutor would be in charge of bringing the cases. But Trump has made clear that prosecuting adversaries like Comey and James is a priority, so it’s unlikely the administration will go quietly.

James’ attorney Abbe Lowell cheered the closure of the case Monday, with a nod to the possibility that the story isn’t over yet.

“We will continue to challenge any further politically motivated charges through every lawful means available,” Lowell said.

Comey, too, said in a video to supporters that he anticipates future efforts by Trump to punish him.

“I know that Donald Trump will probably come after me again and my attitude’s going to be the same,” Comey said. “I’m innocent. I am not afraid. And I believe in an independent federal judiciary.”

At a press conference in Memphis, Tennessee, on Monday announcing anti-crime efforts there, Bondi said the Justice Department would take an “immediate appeal” of the judge’s rulings and also pursue “all available legal action.” She did not elaborate.

Any appeal, which would go to the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, could mean a delay for any attempt to re-indict Comey or James.Is the Comey case cooked since the clock ran out?

When Halligan raced to indict Comey just three days after Bondi appointed her at Trump’s urging, it was to beat a Sept. 30 statute of limitations that would have prevented her from indicting him at all.

Currie’s dismissal of the case, however, may have triggered a law that provides a six-month period for the Justice Department to try again, even after the statute of limitations expired. But it’s murky.

The judge herself suggested that the “void” indictment means there was never a valid trigger for the six-month grace period that would normally accompany the dismissal of an indictment. Other legal experts, however, say federal law is clear: if an indictment is thrown out “for any reason,” as the law states, the Justice Department has six months for a do-over.Was this the cleanest outcome for the Justice Department?

Currie’s ruling Monday disqualifying Halligan based on how she came into the role was arguably the least painful way for the Justice Department to lose the Comey and James cases. That’s because it leaves unresolved a number of actions by the Trump administration and prosecutors that could’ve stung even more.

Rulings throwing the cases out as selective or vindictive prosecutions would have been accompanied by recitations of the unusual tactics Trump employed to see his perceived enemies in the dock. And any decisions undercutting the substance of the charges against Comey or James would have implied they were not guilty of any crime.

Multiple judges had also been sharply questioning DOJ about Halligan’s actions before the grand jury that indicted Comey. And a ruling voiding that indictment based on recent revelations in court that Halligan didn’t physically show the grand jury the final indictment have raised more questions about Halligan’s competence and meager experience.Watch: The Conversation34:26Seth Moulton on his Senate bid, Venezuela and the Epstein files | The Conversation

The challenge to Halligan’s appointment largely skirts those questions by zeroing in on a rather obscure question of interpretation of the attorney general’s authority to temporarily fill vacant U.S. attorney posts.

Asked about Trump’s view of the decision, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “His reaction was, ‘More of the same.’” She dismissed Currie’s action as “a technical ruling” and called the judge a “partisan.”What happens to the selective prosecution claims?

Currie’s decision cut short both cases, leaving unresolved the most explosive question in each: whether the indictments were the product of Trump’s personal animus against Comey and James.

U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, Comey’s trial judge, weighed that question during a hearing last week and pointedly questioned the Justice Department about it. Comey’s lawyers urged him to rule on it quickly and suggested they wanted the matter resolved alongside questions about Halligan’s legitimacy.

It seems unlikely Nachmanoff can make any findings on that question now that Currie has closed the case. But the issue is likely to be at the heart of any renewed prosecution of Comey or James — particularly as Trump’s effort to pressure his administration to bring new investigations and prosecutions has only increased in recent days.What happens to Halligan?

Despite Currie’s ruling, the administration plans to keep Halligan at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia, Bondi said Monday. The attorney general said her move appointing Halligan as a “special” attorney ensures that other cases in the office won’t be jeopardized even if the appeals court rules against the administration.

“We have made Lindsey Halligan a special U.S. Attorney, so she is in court, she can fight in court just like she was,” Bondi said. “Lindsey Halligan is an excellent U.S. attorney. And shame on them for not wanting her in office.”

Nov. 22

 

 

Former FBI Director James Comey, now facing a deeply flawed federal indictment brought by the Trump Administration (File photo). The Justice Integrity Project attended by the federal court hearing in Alexandria, VA that is the main subject of the column below.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Blind Man's Bluff in the Jim Comey Docket, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Nov. 22, 2025. Jim Comey's latest motion to dismiss his prosecution is a bid to air certain complaints before Judges Nachmanoff and Currie decide on other of his challenges to his indictment.

The very last thing Judge Michael Nachmanoff asked Michael Dreeben in Wednesday’s hearing on Jim Comey’s bid to throw out his indictment for vindictive prosecution, before turning to prosecutors’ argument, was whether he should wait and address all of Comey’s challenges at once or deal with vindictive prosecution on its own.

THE COURT: All right. Thank you. But before you sit down, let me just ask you, do you think that the other pending motions, including the issue of literal truth and ambiguity and the other matters that are yet to be litigated, are so wrapped up in vindictive prosecution that the Court should deal with them all at one time, or do you think that the Court can and should deal with vindictive prosecution separately?

MR. DREEBEN: I think vindictive prosecution, like our motion based on the appointment of the U.S. attorney, are threshold matters that the Court should resolve as a threshold. Mr. Comey would like to see both of those motions resolved because they both go to the very heart of whether a prosecution in this case is permissible, one by virtue of a challenge to the official who brought it, the other by virtue of whether it complies with the Constitution to bring a prosecution at all.

Our other motions are very important, and we have a series of them that challenge other aspects of the prosecution. As I’m sure the Court is well aware, there are issues relating to the conduct of the prosecutor in the grand jury. But this one and the appointments issue stand at the threshold. They’re the gateway to all further motions, and those should be resolved at the outset of the case, in our view.

Dreeben, calling vindictive prosecution and disqualification (which Judge Cameron Currie had heard the week before) “threshold” matters, said they should be decided at the outset.

That may explain Nachmanoff’s decision at the very end of the hearing to deny Jessica Carmichael’s request to move up the next motions hearing — the one that would address the other issues Nachmanoff asked Dreeben about — from December 9, what would be almost three weeks (including the Thanksgiving holiday) from that day, to the prior week.

The Comey prosecution may go away, pending appeal, in less than 20 days, via one of at least two ways. Indeed, given Judge Currie’s promise to rule before Thanksgiving, it could go away in the next week (again, pending appeal).

The only crime Comey committed was exposing Donald Trump’s corruption, which led to a Special Counsel investigation that showed abundant evidence Trump obstructed the investigation into his ties with Russia.

Nov. 21 

New York Times, Opinion: The Comey Case Is a Comedy of Errors, David French, right, Nov. 21, 2025. I was a litigator for 21 years, and it’s safe to say that I never witnessed the level of legal incompetence that we are witnessing from the Trump administration.

Consider two stories, both from this week alone. First, on Monday, William Fitzpatrick, a federal magistrate judge who is assisting Michael Nachmanoff, the federal judge presiding over the administration’s prosecution of James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, released an opinion about a series of staggering procedural irregularities that originated with Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s handpicked prosecutor in the case.

The magistrate didn’t recommend dismissing the case (at least not yet), but he did take the highly unusual step of ordering the administration to release otherwise-confidential information about the grand jury proceedings, a move that could very well lay the foundation for dismissal.

The judge found that the prosecutors had mishandled attorney-client communications between Comey and one of his former lawyers, Daniel Richman, who is a law professor at Columbia Law School and a personal friend of Comey’s.

Attorney-client privilege is sacred in the law, and the Trump administration not only abandoned normal Department of Justice procedures for evaluating whether it had seized privileged information when it executed search warrants against Richman during Trump’s first term, it may have even used privileged information to make its case to the grand jury — a gross violation of Comey’s rights

Trump remains on the offensive in American politics. Every day his administration batters the judiciary. Every day, his MAGA movement attacks and terrifies its opponents. Every day, he’s inching forward. His minions often don’t fight with skill, but they fight, and they fight hard.

When Trump is angry, he tends to escalate, not retreat (and retreats only as a last resort), and even the most incompetent men can get their way if they’re powerful enough, brutal enough and relentless enough to keep pushing until rival institutions crumble, crack and fall.

 

All Rise News, Legal Commentary: 'You may sit down': James Comey's prosecutor under fire, Adam Klasfeld, right, Nov. 20, 2025. Inside the briefexchange compounding rookie prosecutor Lindsey Halligan's woes in the Comey case. 

During nearly every pretrial hearing in the James Comey case, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer turned rookie prosecutor Lindsey Halligan remained virtually silent in court.

At Comey’s arraignment, Halligan uttered only two words: her name. As Lawrence O’Donnell memorably put it, she got that wrong. She forgot to register her appearance for the record by adding that she (purportedly) represented the United States. Comey’s pending motion will decide whether she, in effect, has been appearing in court as a private citizen.

Since that time, Halligan avoided repeating that mistake by having her assistants note her appearances in court for her. She was on track for another wordless appearance at the prosecution table until U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff prompted her to explain whether the full grand jury actually saw Comey’s final indictment.

The transcript reflects Halligan’s hesitancy and anxiety during the brief exchange. She interrupts the judge about his interpretation before admitting what she couldn’t deny:

THE COURT: You can. Ms. Halligan, you can come to the podium. You’re counsel of record. You can address the Court. It might be easier. Good morning.

MS. HALLIGAN: Good morning.

THE COURT: So am I correct that, as is the usual —

MS. HALLIGAN: No, your honor.

THE COURT: — practice, that the grand jurors were not present, just the foreperson?

MS. HALLIGAN: The foreperson and another grand juror was also present, and Judge Vaala corrected the record in open court, and the foreperson said in open court, ‘We only no true billed Count One. We want to true bill Count Two and Three,’ and the foreperson signed that indictment.

THE COURT: I’m familiar with the transcript.

MS. HALLIGAN: Okay.

THE COURT: But I just wanted to make sure that the entire grand jury never had the opportunity to see the second indictment. You may sit down. Thank you.

“A couple more questions”

Before that moment, Judge Nachmanoff, right, grilled her assistant Tyler Lemons about what happened during the more than two-hour gap in the grand jury transcript. After a series of questions about Comey’s vindictive prosecution motion, the judge sharply pivoted.

“Well,” the judge said.

He took a pregnant pause before adding: “I have a couple more questions before you sit down.”

Nachmanoff began his inquisition by joining the growing list of judges questioning whether Trump’s Justice Department is entitled to the presumption of regularity, once routinely granted to the government.

“At the beginning of your remarks, you said that the grand jury had returned an indictment and there’s a presumption of regularity with what happened, but as we know from other litigation in this case, there have been some questions and some attempts to resolve those issues,” Nachmanoff said.

The outlet Just Security has catalogued at least 58 instances in which federal judges found Trump’s government took “arbitrary and capricious” actions and numerous findings that the presumption of regularity had been “forfeited.”

Comey’s grand jury transcript is silent between 4:28 p.m. and 6:40 p.m. Eastern Time on Sept. 25.

Halligan insisted in a court declaration that the panel deliberated throughout that time without interacting with government lawyers, but Nachmanoff noted that there were two versions of the indictment.

Signed in blue ink, the first version reported that the grand jurors “did not concur in finding an indictment in this case.” A hand-drawn notation in black indicated that the no-bill was as to “Count 1 only.”

Under heavy questioning by the judge, Lemons said that “no government personnel appeared in front of the grand jury again” after deliberations began. The prosecutor’s explanation veers into passive voice frequently from there. Halligan “was informed by another person in the [U.S. Attorney’s] office” about the first indictment, and she “was handed” a revision.”

Cutting to the chase, Nachmanoff asked Lemons whether he was saying that “someone in the U.S. Attorney’s Office drafted a new indictment, but that new indictment was never presented to the entire grand jury in the grand jury room.”

Lemons conferred privately with Halligan before conceding, rather circuitously, that this was true.

Nachmanoff repeated: “Let me be clear that the second indictment, the operative indictment in this case that Mr. Comey faces, is a document that was never shown to the entire grand jury or presented in the grand jury room; is that correct?”

“Standing here in front of you, your honor: Yes, that is my understanding,” Lemons confirmed.

Halligan’s confirmation fell shortly after that.

The fallout of the admission remains to be seen: Judge Nachmanoff asked the parties to brief appellate court precedent of a case, Gaither v. United States, where an indictment survived a similar grand jury discrepancy.

But Nachmanoff appeared taken aback by the revelation, which raises the question about whether Comey is under federal indictment at all.

“Briefly on the colloquy that you had with counsel on the indictment, it appears that counsel is acknowledging that the operative indictment in this case was never shown to the grand jury and that there is no indictment that Mr. Comey is facing that was returned before the elapse of the statute of limitations,” Comey’s lawyer Michael Dreeben said.

The Justice Department, for its part, is preparing for the worst — with a misleading personal attack against Nachmanoff, over the judge’s eyebrow-raising exchange with Comey’s attorney.

“So your view is that Ms. Halligan is a stalking horse or a puppet, for want of a better word, doing the president’s bidding?” Nachmanoff said, referring to the basis of Comey’s vindictive prosecution motion.

“Well, I don’t want to use language about Ms. Halligan that suggests anything other than she did what she was told to do,” Dreeben said, diplomatically.

Halligan, who was in court to hear the accurate exchange, told reporters: “Personal attacks — like Judge Nachmanoff referring to me as a ‘puppet’ — don’t change the facts or the law.”

Nachmanoff said that he would take the matter “under advisement,” calling the matters “too weighty and too complex” for a ruling from the bench. It remains to be seen whether the case will survive a motion to disqualify Halligan that U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie indicated she would rule on before Thanksgiving. 

Emptywheel, Analysis: What We Know about the Day of Jim Comey’s Indictment, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Nov. 20, 2025. Let’s assume for the moment that, to the extent the players involved in indicting Jim Comey understand the least little bit about what went down, they’re telling the truth.

Here’s what Lindsey Halligan’s big day would look like.

In the morning, “the team” worked together to prepare the indictment against Comey. According to CNN, that team included the FBI agents from the FBI Director’s Advisory Team pursuing this case and FBI attorneys.

Halligan, left, spent hours preparing with a group that included FBI attorneys and the agents who had led the investigation, the sources said.

Halligan participated in a number of “practice runs” and spent hours going through the exhibits in preparation, the sources said.

 

Then-FBI Director James Comey delivering a speech at a conference on civil rights and law enforcement in 2016 (Public domain photo). 

Lawfare, Legal Commentary: Comey, James, and ‘Animus Through a Megaphone,’ Molly Roberts, Nov. 20, 2025. Claims of vindictive prosecution are usually hard to win. But James Comey and Letitia James both have unusual cases

James Comey and Letitia James both know that getting a case dismissed for selective and/or vindictive prosecution is typically a tall order for a defendant. They say as much in their respective motions requesting just that. They also both point out why this time might be different: As James’s motion colorfully puts it, “Here, the Executive has shouted six years of direct evidence of genuine animus through a megaphone.”

The manner in which the two separate filings chronicle this animus is similar—and similarly striking. But the differences reveal almost as much. They show the breadth and depth of the manners in which the current Justice Department has perverted the prosecutorial process to satisfy a president seeking retribution against his political enemies.

Selective and/or Vindictive Prosecution

The word “vindictive” seems to perfectly describe President Trump’s prosecutorial campaigns against his longtime adversaries—to a layman, at least. Legally, however, the bar for dismissal for selective or vindictive prosecution (separate flaws, though often coupled by defense teams) is high.

As Ema Rose Schumer writes in Lawfare, safeguards against vindictive prosecution are rooted in the Due Process Clause. To prevail on such a claim, a defendant must either prove that charges were directly in retaliation for exercising a legal right or “show facts sufficient to create a ‘realistic likelihood of vindictiveness,’” at which point the government must justify its decision to bring a case as reasonable. Another common way of putting it: The defendant has to show he wouldn’t have been prosecuted “but for” the vindictive motive.

Selective prosecution draws on the Equal Protection Clause principle that the government can’t discriminate between “similarly situated” defendants: prosecuting one member of a class while neglecting to prosecute others outside that class who may have broken the same rules. Here, a defendant must show that the prosecution had not only a discriminatory effect but also a discriminatory purpose—that a case was brought “because of” a protected characteristic or activity rather than “in spite of” it.

In Oyler v. Boles, the Supreme Court found that protected characteristics for these purposes could be “race, religion, or other arbitrary classifications.” Protected activity, meanwhile, is usually a constitutional prerogative such as the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression, though, according to Comey and James, statutory duties also count—duties like carrying out one’s professional responsibilities as FBI director or New York attorney general.

“I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

Comey, right, and James both set about establishing the retaliatory nature of the charges against them by cataloguing President Trump’s relentless insults and his demands for “justice” to be served against them. For Comey, six years of direct evidence of animus are nothing; Trump has been railing against him for almost a decade now. The 60-page appendix of attacks—tweets, throwaway lines at rallies, and more—accompanying his motion reflects this extended timeline.

“This is an extraordinary case,” attorney Michael Dreeben said in his argument for the defense during a Nov. 11 hearing on the motion, “and it merits an extraordinary remedy.”

The tale begins in May of 2017, a week before Comey was fired as FBI director, with a missive reading, “FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds! The phony…”—an apparent reference to Comey’s supervision of the “Midyear Exam” investigation into Hillary Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified information as secretary of state.

The intervening years of rants and raves make clear precisely what has angered Trump: not just “Midyear Exam,” but “Crossfire Hurricane”—or what he calls the “Russia Hoax.” Comey’s own critiques of Trump (“a person… for whom affirmation is like oxygen”; “a near-existential threat to the rule of law”; “a strange and slightly sad old guy yelling at you to get off his lawn, echoed by younger but no less sad people in red hats”) only fueled the president’s fury.

What did the president want done about this? That’s also no secret. The Comey story ends this September with a series of Truth Social tirades, including a now-notorious post addressed to the attorney general, or “Pam”:

What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia [sic]??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done… We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!

Finally, Trump celebrated the indictment that the Justice Department eventually secured:

The level of enthusiasm by the FBI was incredible, but only caused by the fact that they knew Comey for what he is, and was, a total SLIMEBALL! Again, thank you to the FBI and, specifically, those that worked on this case with U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, and the DOJ.

During the hearing, the defense emphasized that there is a deeper pattern to the case than intermittent flurries of vituperative tweets. Instead, every time Comey expressed one of his opinions—from his initial testimony before Congress on the heels of his fire; to his book, “A Higher Loyalty”; to his remarks about Trump’s fitness for office surrounding the 2024 election—he triggered a barrage of vulgar and venomous responses from the president that often included calls for his jailing. In contrast, when Comey went silent, “so did the president.” This persistent phenomenon of action and reaction, Dreeben said, reveals that Trump hoped to use the “awesome weight of threatening to deprive somebody of liberty as a means of deterring somebody from speaking out, punishing their speech and expressing personal animosity.”

Unsurprisingly, the animus explicated in James’s motion broadly matches—even if the particulars vary. She has managed to amass an impressive 113 pages of examples of Trump’s animus toward her, perhaps to compensate for the shorter period during which she has been on his list of adversaries. Her hearing will take place on Dec. 5.

James’s tale starts with her pursuing the Trump Organization on charges of illegally inflating the value of various assets. Soon after her investigation began, Trump retweeted legal “analysis” from conservative influencers:

AG Letitia James of New York is abusing her power by targeting the POTUS. Using the Attorney General office as a weapon to deliberately target the President because of Political Bias should be against the Law and a violation of the Hatch Act!

This marked the beginning of a flurry of tweets about James—nine in the next two days, the motion says—including odd monikers (“Letitia ‘Peekaboo’ James”) and other name-calling (“racist,” “fraud”) as well as 14 calls for her prosecution leading up to his trial. One of these is practically the dictionary definition of retaliatory: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

“JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Even extensive records of animus as exuberantly articulated as President Trump’s aren’t necessarily enough to win on a motion to dismiss for selective and/or vindictive prosecution. When it comes to showing that the government had no reasonable basis to bring a case—and that, indeed, it wouldn’t have brought a case if not for the chief executive’s desire for revenge—Comey and James’s arguments aren’t just similar. They’re nearly identical.

The post addressed to “Pam”—apparently intended as a direct message—represents only one instance in a highly unusual series of events culminating in the indictments of both defendants.

Nov. 19

New York Times, Trump Loyalist Admits Grand Jury Never Saw Final Comey Indictment, Alan Feuer and Devlin Barrett, Nov. 19, 2025. Grand jurors have to vote on indictments to approve them, but a prosecutor told the judge in the case that only the foreperson formally approved the second charging document, a move that could cripple the case.

A federal judge put the prosecutors pursuing charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, through the wringer on Wednesday, interrogating them with a series of questions that underscored irregularities in the case, including that the full grand jury did not see the indictment it was supposed to have approved.

The grilling by the judge, Michael S. Nachmanoff, took place at an excruciatingly awkward hearing in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., that was nominally held to consider the narrow issue of whether the charges against Mr. Comey had been filed as an act of vindictive retribution by President Trump.

But Judge Nachmanoff peppered prosecutors with questions on a range of topics, including Mr. Trump’s own statements about wanting Mr. Comey to be indicted, and an earlier decision by career members of the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria to forgo bringing charges.

In one remarkable moment, the judge posed some of his questions directly to Lindsey Halligan, the U.S. attorney handpicked by Mr. Trump to bring the case, quizzing her on how she had presented it to the grand jury. Just this week, that subject led another judge involved in the case to suggest that she may have engaged in prosecutorial misconduct.

Judge Nachmanoff’s inquiries were extraordinary by almost any measure. But the answers prosecutors gave him in return were even more so.

At one point, Ms. Halligan admitted that she had never shown the second — and final — version of the Comey indictment to the full grand jury before the foreperson signed the charging document. Mr. Comey’s lawyers immediately seized on that irregularity, calling it another reason to dismiss the case entirely.

At another point, one of Ms. Halligan’s subordinates, Tyler Lemons, acknowledged that someone in the deputy attorney general’s office had instructed him not to discuss in open court whether his predecessors had — or had not — written a memo laying out their reasons for not bringing charges, because that was privileged information.

In the end, Mr. Lemons, appearing unnerved under questioning, confessed that the prosecutors who had previously handled the case had indeed written a draft of a memo declining prosecution.

The spectacle, which played out over nearly 90 minutes of tense courtroom colloquy, drove home just how slapdash the prosecution of Mr. Comey appeared to have been from its inception. Judge Nachmanoff declined to issue a ruling from the bench on Mr. Comey’s claims that the case was brought vindictively. But he appeared to be leaning in that direction. Given the other revelations of the day, he could now have more reasons to throw out the charges.Editors’ PicksIs the Suit Making a Comeback?Parasitic Queen: Now She’s Stealing an Ant FiefOur 100 Easiest-Ever Thanksgiving Sides

The most surprising development might have been the government’s admission, first delivered by Mr. Lemons, that Ms. Halligan had never showed the revised indictment in the case — the one that was ultimately used to charge Mr. Comey — to all of the grand jurors. Grand jurors have to vote on indictments to approve them, but Mr. Lemons told Judge Nachmanoff that only the foreperson formally approved the second charging document, a move that could in theory cripple the case.

When Ms. Halligan first went into the grand jury, she had initially sought a three-count indictment against Mr. Comey. And after the grand jurors rejected one of the charges, she did not re-present the case with only two counts, but simply had the original indictment redrafted to reflect the failure of a third.

Judge Nachmanoff seemed stunned by the events, and asked Ms. Halligan to stand up in court to answer questions. He asked her whether the entire grand jury had the opportunity to see the second indictment.

She told him it had not. He thanked her and told her to sit down.

The government’s team consisted of Ms. Halligan, a former White House aide and personal lawyer to Mr. Trump who is working on the first criminal case of her career. She was accompanied by Mr. Lemons and another assistant U.S. attorney, Gabriel Diaz, both of whom have experience with criminal proceedings but were brought in from a U.S. attorney’s office in North Carolina after no one in the Alexandria office would take the job.

Speaking for Mr. Comey, by contrast, was Michael R. Dreeben, a former deputy solicitor general who has argued more than 100 cases in front of the Supreme Court.

Mr. Dreeben got right to the point, telling Judge Nachmanoff that the charges should be thrown out as a violation of the First Amendment and due process rights, because Mr. Trump had used the Justice Department to “punish and deter those who would speak out against him.”

“This is an extraordinary case, and it merits an extraordinary remedy,” Mr. Dreeben said. “The president of the United States caused the executive branch to prosecute a perceived political enemy.”

He urged Judge Nachmanoff to put an end to what he described as the White House’s abuse of the criminal justice system.

“This has to stop,” he told the judge. “This court is the first to confront the issue of whether a message needs to be sent to the executive branch.”

At the heart of Mr. Dreeben’s presentation was the story of how Mr. Trump strong-armed top Justice Department officials into charging Mr. Comey over a weekend in September.

The president, in an angry social media post, ordered his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to prosecute Mr. Comey, his longtime foe. Those demands came shortly after Mr. Trump ousted Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who had refused to indict Mr. Comey, and just before he chose the inexperienced loyalist, Ms. Halligan, as his replacement.

Within four days of taking the post, Ms. Halligan presented the charges to the grand jury — by herself and for her very first time — and came out with an indictment.

Mr. Comey was accused of lying to and obstructing Congress during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020. At the hearing, he was asked about whether he had authorized anyone at the F.B.I. to serve as an anonymous source in newspaper articles about sensitive political investigations.

Motions for vindictive prosecution are generally recognized as being difficult to win. They require defendants to prove that prosecutors displayed a clear animus toward them while they were trying to exercise their rights, and that charges would never have been brought except for that animus.

But Mr. Dreeben said that dismissal was warranted in this case because Mr. Trump had consistently attacked Mr. Comey since firing him as F.B.I. director in May 2017, almost always in response to criticism raised by Mr. Comey. He also pointed out that Ms. Halligan had brought the charges at Mr. Trump’s command, an assertion that the judge appeared to agree with.

“So Ms. Halligan was the stalking horse, or to use a different word — a puppet — for the president?” Judge Nachmanoff asked.

Mr. Dreeben said that while he did not want to call anyone names, it was his view that Ms. Halligan “did what she was told.”

When Mr. Lemons rose to provide his own presentation, the judge seemed less susceptible to his arguments.

He said, for instance, that Ms. Halligan — who was no “puppet,” he insisted — had made her own evaluation of the case and came to a decision to charge Mr. Comey regardless of the pressure brought on her by Mr. Trump.

Judge Nachmanoff appeared skeptical of that assertion, reminding Mr. Lemons that Ms. Halligan had sought the indictment days after taking the job of U.S. attorney. That, the judge went on, did not give her much time for deliberation.

There was a similar back-and-forth about Mr. Trump’s online post directing Ms. Bondi to bring charges. Mr. Lemons claimed that Ms. Halligan did not interpret the presidential message as an order to do anything — another claim that did not go over well.

Shortly after, Mr. Lemons brought his presentation to an end, thanking the judge and moving toward his seat. But the judge was not ready to let him go.

“I have couple more questions,” he said before he started in on his inquiries about Ms. Halligan’s time in the grand jury. 

Nov. 18

Trump White House Aides Lindsey Halligan, center, and Susie Wiles, left, join a Women's History celebration at the White House hosted by President Trump in March 2025 (Public domain photo).

Lawfare, The Situation: Malevolence, Incompetence, and the Strange Case of Lindsey Halligan, Benjamin Wittes, right, Nov. 18, 2025. Yesterday, a magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a startling 24-page opinion—or, rather, an opinion that should be startling to a reader not already inured to the combination of misconduct and incompetence that is the stock and trade of the president’s hand-picked prosecutor for his political foes.

The decision by Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick—whom you are not to confuse with James Comey’s defense attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald—ordered the release of the grand jury transcripts in the Comey case to the Comey defense team.

In and of itself, this outcome is not a surprise. Judge Fitzpatrick had tried to do this once before, during a hearing on Nov. 5—only to have the government appeal and the district court kick the matter back to him “to analyze whether there are particularized and factually based grounds for disclosure.”

The government then asked, foolishly in retrospect, “that the Court review the transcript of grand jury testimony in camera to confirm the baselessness of the defendant’s claim that privileged information may have been shared with the grand jury.” It’s not exactly a shock that, after doing this review, Judge Fitzpatrick found that he agrees with himself that the material should, as he ordered before, be disclosed to the defense.

What is a shock is the diversity and range of his “particularized and factually based grounds” for doing so.

Judge Fitzpatrick makes a series of factual findings that amount to this claim: “[T]he government’s actions in this case—whether purposeful, reckless, or negligent—raise genuine issues of misconduct, are inextricably linked to the government’s grand jury presentation, and deserve to be fully explored by the defense.”

Nov. 17

New York Times, Judge Says Justice Dept. May Have Committed Misconduct in Comey Case, Alan Feuer, Nov. 17, 2025. The magistrate judge raised the question of whether “government misconduct” in the case might require dismissing the charges against the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, altogether.

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.

The remarkable rebuke of Ms. Halligan came in a 24-page ruling in which the magistrate judge, William E. Fitzpatrick, ordered her to give Mr. Comey’s lawyers all of the grand jury materials she used to obtain the indictment and raised the question of whether “government misconduct” in the case might require dismissing the charges altogether.

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.”

“The court is finding that the government’s actions in this case — whether purposeful, reckless or negligent — raise genuine issues of misconduct, are inextricably linked to the government’s grand jury presentation and deserve to be fully explored by the defense,” Judge Fitzpatrick wrote.

As part of his ruling, the judge ordered prosecutors to provide Mr. Comey’s lawyers by Monday evening with the same grand jury materials that he himself has already looked at — a measure he described as “an extraordinary remedy.” Typically, grand jury notes are kept secret before trial, even from defendants and their lawyers.

But the disclosure was needed, Judge Fitzpatrick said, to permit Mr. Comey’s legal team to delve into the question of whether Ms. Halligan and an F.B.I. agent who testified in front of the grand jury had conducted themselves properly when they secured the indictment.

Minutes before the first portion of the grand jury notes were to be handed over to Mr. Comey’s legal team, prosecutors filed an emergency request seeking to halt Judge Fitzpatrick’s order. Calling it “contrary to law,” the prosecutors said they wanted to quickly raise objections to the ruling in front Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff, the district court judge who is overseeing the case.

The ruling by Judge Fitzpatrick was only the most recent setback in the Justice Department’s efforts to bring charges against Mr. Comey — a decision that was initially rejected by Ms. Halligan’s predecessor as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik S. Siebert. In an extraordinary move, Mr. Trump ousted Mr. Siebert in September to make way for Ms. Halligan after he suggested there was insufficient evidence to file an indictment against Mr. Comey.

Judge Fitzpatrick’s harsh words came just days after a different judge involved in the Comey case raised doubts about a separate question pertaining to Ms. Halligan: namely, whether Attorney General Pam Bondi had lawfully appointed her to her post as U.S. attorney in the first place. The judge overseeing that issue said she would make a decision on the matter by Thanksgiving.Editors’ PicksThis 1,200-Page Poetry Book Affirms Seamus Heaney’s Towering GeniusMy Landlord Is Trying to Cheat Me on a Lease Renewal‘Chess’ Review: At Least They Have the Music

The indictment against Mr. Comey charges him with lying to and obstructing Congress during an appearance he made in September 2020 in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the hearing, he was asked questions about whether he had authorized anyone at the F.B.I. to serve as an anonymous source in newspaper articles about sensitive investigations.

Ms. Halligan, who had never worked on a criminal case until she was thrust into the Comey prosecution, has faced extensive scrutiny from the moment Mr. Trump installed her atop the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia against the wishes of many career prosecutors there. Her critics have pointed out that her previous experience in the law was limited to working as an insurance lawyer and serving as a personal lawyer to Mr. Trump.

It is extremely unusual for judges to examine how prosecutors act in front of grand juries, let alone to openly criticize their conduct. But that is exactly what Judge Fitzpatrick did to Ms. Halligan.

He noted that during her grand jury presentation she appears to have misrepresented a basic tenet of the law by suggesting that Mr. Comey did not have the right, under the Fifth Amendment, to avoid testifying at his own trial.

She also appears to have made another astonishing error, Judge Fitzpatrick said. In his ruling, he pointed out that she told grand jurors that they did not have to rely solely “on the record before them” to return an indictment against Mr. Comey, but instead “could be assured the government had more evidence — perhaps better evidence — that would be presented at trial.”

The judge also said that Ms. Halligan appears to have botched her efforts to pare down the three-count indictment she had initially sought against Mr. Comey after grand jurors rejected one of the charges. Moreover, he noted that the grand jury transcripts he later received from her did not appear to contain her presentation of the second, two-charge indictment to the grand jury, leaving the record incomplete.

If, however, a second presentation was never made, then the court “is in uncharted legal territory,” he went on.

That would suggest, he wrote, “that the indictment returned in open court was not the same charging document presented to and deliberated upon by the grand jury.”

“Either way,” the judge concluded, “this unusual series of events, still not fully explained by the prosecutor’s declaration, calls into question the presumption of regularity generally associated with grand jury proceedings, and provides another genuine issue the defense may raise to challenge the manner in which the government obtained the indictment.”

Judge Fitzpatrick mentioned one more potential problem with the government’s grand jury presentation. He questioned whether the F.B.I. agent who was the sole witness to have testified may have inadvertently disclosed information that should not have been revealed because of the attorney-client privilege.

Ultimately, the decision about whether to dismiss the case based on these purported grand jury errors will lie with Judge Nachmanoff, the district court judge. Judge Nachmanoff has already scheduled a hearing for early December to consider separate but related claims by Mr. Comey’s lawyers that Ms. Halligan had abused the grand jury process.

 

New York Times, The Unraveling of the Justice Department, Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser, Photographs by Stephen Voss, Nov. 16-17, 2025 (interactive). Sixty attorneys describe a year of chaos and suspicion. 

“If we’re indicting people because the president hates them, that’s counter to the whole point of doing my job.”

       -- Mike Romano, former prosecutor in the Public Integrity Section

“Our job wasn’t to engage in fact-finding investigations; our job was to find the facts that would fit the narrative.”

       --  Dena Robinson, former lawyer in the Civil Rights Division

“They didn’t want the ethics office calling them up and telling them what to do.”

       -- Joseph Tirrell, former director of the Departmental Ethics Office

President Trump’s second term has brought a period of turmoil and controversy unlike any in the history of the Justice Department. Trump and his appointees have blasted through the walls designed to protect the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency from political influence; they have directed the course of criminal investigations, openly flouted ethics rules and caused a breakdown of institutional culture. To date, more than 200 career attorneys have been fired, and thousands more have resigned. (The Justice Department says many of them have been replaced.)

What was it like inside this institution as Trump’s officials took control? It’s not an easy question to answer. Justice Department norms dictate that career attorneys, who are generally nonpartisan public servants, rarely speak to the press. And the Trump administration’s attempts to crack down on leaks have made all federal employees fearful of sharing information.

But the exodus of lawyers has created an opportunity to understand what’s happening within the agency. We interviewed more than 60 attorneys who recently resigned or were fired from the Justice Department. Much of what they told us is reported here for the first time.

Beginning with Trump’s first day in office, the lawyers narrated the events that most alarmed them over the next 10 months. They described being asked to drop cases for political reasons, to find evidence for flimsy investigations and to take positions in court they thought had no legitimate basis. They also talked about the work they and their colleagues were told to abandon — investigations of terrorist plots, corruption and white-collar fraud.

Some spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation against them or their new employers. We corroborated their accounts with multiple sources, interviewing their colleagues to confirm the details of what they described and reviewing court documents and contemporaneous notes. We also sent a list of questions to the Justice Department and the White House. “This story is a useless collection of recycled, debunked hearsay from disgruntled former employees,” a spokeswoman for the D.O.J. responded in an email. “Targeting the department’s political leadership while ignoring the questionable conduct of former attorneys who do not have the American people’s best interest at heart shows exactly how biased this story is, and further illustrates why Americans are turning away from biased, outdated legacy media platforms.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, sent this statement: “These are nothing more than pathetic complaints lodged by anti-Trump government workers. President Trump is working on behalf of the millions of Americans who voted for him all across the country, not the D.C. bureaucrats who try to stymie the American people’s agenda at every turn.”

The attorneys who spoke to us for this project, many of whom have spent decades in government service, disagree.

Nov. 13

 

 

“The [Appointments] Clause is a bulwark against one branch aggrandizing its power at the expense of another branch, but it is more: it ‘preserves another aspect of the Constitution’s structural integrity by preventing the diffusion of the appointment power.’”

— Justice William Rehnquist, Ryder v. United States (1995)

All Rise News, Comey bombshell: Grand jury record section MISSING — Live from Federal Court, Adam Klasfeld, Nov. 13, 2025. A federal judge expressed deep skepticism that James Comey and Letitia James's top prosecutor was validly appointed, and she said she'drule by Thanksgiving.

During most federal court oral arguments on a motion to dismiss, the headline most reporters look for is a prediction about where the judge is leaning. In a criminal case, is it looking better for the government or the defense?

By that metric, the headline is easy: “Judge Deeply Skeptical Trump-Installed Prosecutor Was Validly Appointed.” Perhaps the lead would weigh the odds of the dismissal of two of the country’s most closely watched cases: U.S. v. James Comey and U.S. v. Letitia James. To mitigate the risk of an inaccurate prediction, an experienced reporter would hedge (accurately) that Senior U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie sharply questioned the futures of both cases.

Even with the possible dismissal of these historic cases on the line, a factual revelation overshadowed the gambling odds today.

Judge Currie revealed that there’s a more than two-hour gap in Comey’s grand jury record. There was no court reporter present between 4:28 p.m. Eastern Time until the return of the indictment at around 6:47 p.m. ET.Mind the gap

That means there is no record of what happened in those nearly two-and-half hours when a razor-thin majority of grand jurors decided to return a two-count indictment—and rejected what would have become the top charge.

As a legal matter, that could doom the government’s case against Comey entirely.

Both Comey and James argue that Trump’s former lawyer turned first time prosecutor Lindsey Halligan was illegally appointed because she is the second interim U.S. Attorney in her district to be installed in her role without Senate confirmation. Trump pressured out her predecessor Erik Siebert, a conservative, because Siebert did not believe the cases against Comey and James were warranted. Before becoming a Supreme Court justice, Samuel Alito wrote a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion finding that two consecutive interim U.S. Attorney appointments aren’t permissible.

Three Trump-installed acting U.S. Attorneys — Alina Habba, Bill Essayli, and Sigal Chattah — have been disqualified from their positions after similar challenges, despite entering their offices through a different mechanism. Halligan would be the fourth consecutive defeat for Trump-appointed prosecutors.

On Oct. 31, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to shore up Halligan’s bona fides by issuing an order claiming to retroactively declare Halligan a “special attorney.” She claimed to make that decision “based on [her] review of the grand jury proceedings” in both cases.

Currie pointed out that it “became obvious to me that the Attorney General could not have reviewed” the full grand jury materials once she spotted the gap.“A fundamental defect”

Throughout the proceedings, Comey sat in the courtroom next to attorneys Abbe Lowell and Ephraim McDowell. Halligan was flanked by her out-of-district assistant prosecutors Henry Whitaker and Nathaniel Lemons. Neither Comey nor Halligan said a word during the proceedings.

Whitaker tried to downplay the controversy as “at best, a paperwork error.”

But Lowell noted: “This is not a mere technicality because it goes to whether a person was competent at the time they sat in this case.”

McDowell, representing Comey, framed defense arguments with this introduction.

“This prosecution should be dismissed with prejudice because of a fundamental defect,” he said, referring to the failure to pass constitutional and statutory muster. “Since the Founding of our nation, United States Attorneys have been confirmed by the Senate.”

If not reversed on appeal, a dismissal with prejudice would stop the government from pursuing the cases again. To prevail, the defense would need to prove that Halligan’s appointment wasn’t “harmless error,” which depends on an analysis of whether the case would exist “but-for” the identified flaw.

Lowell called that test an easy one. “If this is not a good example of the ‘but-for’ under harmless error, I couldn’t think of one myself,” he said.

Politico, Judge appears skeptical of Lindsey Halligan’s appointment as interim US attorney, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, A ruling against Halligan could threaten the cases she brought against James Comey and Letitia James.

A federal judge expressed deep skepticism Thursday about whether a federal prosecutor handpicked by President Donald Trump to bring criminal cases against his political rivals was legally appointed to the role.

It’s unclear whether U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie’s open doubts about the appointment of Lindsey Halligan will sink the cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. But the Clinton-appointed judge’s ruling, which she said would come before Thanksgiving, could derail both.

Currie, one of two judges who have reviewed the grand jury transcripts related to the indictments, revealed little about the secret proceedings but said they confirmed that “Ms. Halligan acted alone,” without any other government attorneys in the room. That could threaten both cases if Currie ultimately decides Halligan was invalidly appointed as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, since no legitimately appointed prosecutor signed the indictments.

Currie seemed particularly concerned that a portion of the grand jury proceedings that led to Comey’s indictment was “missing,” leaving certain aspects of Halligan’s interactions with the grand jury unreviewable. Currie said that it appeared at about 4:28 p.m. on the day the indictment was returned in September, there was no court reporter in the room to transcribe the proceedings, leaving no record of the final minutes of the grand jury’s session.

Comey was charged with obstruction and making a false statement to Congress related to testimony he gave in 2020 to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the FBI’s investigation into links between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. James was charged with bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution related to a home loan she obtained for a secondary residence in Virginia. Both have pleaded not guilty.

At Trump’s urging in a September social media post, Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly appointed Halligan as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, just days after Trump helped force out the office’s previous leader, Erik Siebert, over his resistance to bringing both cases. But attorneys for Comey and James said Halligan was ineligible to take the job because Siebert had already held the temporary role for the legal limit of 120 days.

The risk for the Trump administration is particularly acute in the Comey case because Halligan secured the indictment just days before a Sept. 30 legal deadline that has now elapsed.

The Thursday hearing lasted a little over an hour. Comey was present in the courtroom, along with several members of his family in the public gallery, while James was not in attendance. Halligan, who was in court and seated at the prosecution table, did not address the judge.

Currie, based in South Carolina, was tapped to address Halligan’s qualifications because of concerns that doing so could pose a conflict for judges in the Virginia district who routinely handle cases brought by the U.S. attorney’s office Halligan is overseeing.

Justice Department attorney Henry Whitaker urged Currie to treat questions about Halligan’s appointment as, at most, a “paperwork error” and emphasized that Bondi had reviewed the grand jury materials and agreed to retroactively “ratify” Halligan’s actions, even if her initial appointment is deemed invalid.

But Currie said the missing component of the grand jury transcript called into question the sufficiency of Bondi’s review.

“It became obvious to me that the attorney general could not have reviewed those portions of the transcript presented by Ms. Halligan,” Currie said. The judge also questioned why Bondi signed a statement saying she had reviewed Halligan’s actions before the grand jury when transcripts of some of that presentation “did not exist.”

“She couldn’t have,” Currie said.

Whitaker said Bondi had reviewed the “material facts” of Halligan’s grand jury presentation, which showed that “the grand jury made a decision based on the facts and the law.”

Attorneys for Comey and James said it’s not possible for the Justice Department to retroactively empower a prosecutor who acted without legitimacy to secure an indictment. James’ lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said that such a ruling would mean that private citizens like “Steve Bannon or Elon Musk” could secure a grand jury indictment only to have it blessed later by the Justice Department.

In one head-turning moment, Whitaker said the Justice Department takes issue with one aspect of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling last year tossing special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump on charges related to classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago. Whitaker said Cannon went too far when she questioned the attorney general’s appointment power in a way that he said could undercut the authority of most of the lawyers working at DOJ headquarters.

“We do disagree with that,” Whitaker said. The issue could have relevance for Halligan’s appointment, since Bondi’s recent order claims to retroactively appoint Halligan as a DOJ prosecution under several alternative statutes if her interim U.S. attorney appointment is deemed invalid.

Defense attorneys also pressed Currie to treat her role in a more grandiose context: the preservation of the separation of powers and checks on presidential power. Blessing Halligan’s appointment, they said, would effectively gut the Senate’s role in confirming U.S. attorney nominees, since all presidents could make end-runs around that constitutional requirement.

“This case is a bulwark against one branch aggrandizing its power against another,” Lowell said.

“There would never be any reason to go through Senate confirmation again,” an attorney for Comey, Ephraim McDowell, told Currie.

Currie seemed to tip her hand in her first question Thursday, asking if Comey’s defense attorneys had seen the ”declination memo” related to the case. That alluded to news reports that career prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office prepared a detailed analysis of the potential charges and concluded that they were too flimsy to pursue.

Defense lawyers revealed they had not yet seen the declination memo but hoped to obtain it during the discovery process before trial.

The judge also seemed intimately familiar with recent decisions in other courts that found three of the Trump administration’s other picks for temporary U.S. attorney roles were illegitimate. In those cases, judges ruled that even though the appointees were disqualified, the cases they supervised could continue because other career prosecutors had signed off on them.

Oct. 21

Former FBI Director James Comey, shown in a file photo at his U.S. Senate testimony on June 8, 2017, filed two motions on Oct. 20 to dismissed the false statement and obstruction charges that the Trump Justice Department brought against him in September regarding his congressional testimony on another occasion

Civil Discourse, Legal Analysis: Comey Moves To Dismiss, Joyce Vance, right, law professor and former federal prosecutor, Oct. 20-21, 2025. As expected, former FBI Director James Comey asked a federal judge to dismiss the indictment against him.

He filed two motions

• A motion to dismiss the indictment because “the government has singled out Mr. Comey for prosecution because of his protected speech and because of President Trump’s personal animus toward Mr. Comey.” The defense argues that the case is “a vindictive and selective prosecution” and that it “violates the First Amendment, Due Process Clause, and equal protection principles.” The motion argues that the only proper remedy is dismissal of the case, with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled. Comey’s lawyers write that “Any lesser remedy would be insufficient in light of the government’s flagrant misconduct and the need to deter the government from bringing further unconstitutional prosecutions.”
• A motion to dismiss the indictment, arguing it’s “fatally flawed” because the appointment of Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, left, violated the Appointments Clause and the statute authorizing appointments of interim U.S. Attorneys. That provision allows a president to appoint an interim U.S. Attorney for 120 days. After 120 days elapses, if the president hasn’t managed to put a Senate confirmed nominee in place, the local district court selects a U.S. Attorney to serve until that happens. Comey’s lawyers argue that because Halligan, “who purported to secure and sign the indictment was invalidly appointed to her position as interim U.S. Attorney ... the indictment is a nullity and must be dismissed.” Again, they argue for dismissal with the prejudice, so that the government cannot refile charges against Comey at a later date.

Both motions are strong and it would be unsurprising, after briefing and oral argument, to see one or both of them granted and the prosecution dismissed.

There’s a subtle factor at work here too, one that’s more difficult to explain. These motions aren’t just substantively meritorious, they are exceptionally well researched, organized, and written. Sometimes, judges find themselves in the position of having to sift through the arguments one or the other of the parties to a lawsuit has made in order to do justice. In other words, judges, at least to some extent, try to do the right thing and reach the right conclusions in a case, not penalizing the client if the lawyer’s argument is poorly organized and the judge has to piece it together to determine who has the right of it.

That won’t be necessary here. The analysis in the defense motions is immaculate. And while that might not seem like a matter worth noting, it speaks volumes about the quality of the legal representation Comey has. It also inspires confidence. The Judge will understand which lawyer can be replied upon when the parties are in his courtroom. These motions make the right arguments and cover all the points necessary to support them. They are winners.

Comey defense lawyer Pat Fitzgerald

In advance of today’s motions, Halligan went on the attack against Comey lawyer, Pat Fitzgerald, right. She wants him out of the case. She’s smart to be afraid of him, because in the battle between prosecutor and defense lawyer, she is clearly outmatched. She did it with an obscure procedural motion, one asking the Judge to expedite his decision on a motion she had filed previously.

That motion was one for “Implementation of Filter Protocol,” which requires a little explanation. Stick with me here.

DOJ uses “filter teams” to screen evidence seized in an investigation, including evidence involving attorney client privilege, where it wants to be able to use that evidence, but some of it may be privileged, which means prosecutors can’t have access to it. So a “taint team” or “filter team” is used to evaluate the evidence and make sure nothing privileged goes to the case team. Back on October 13, the government filed a request to use a filter team to review electronic evidence (likely emails) that it said was “obtained from an attorney” in a prior investigation.

It wasn’t at all clear what they were talking about. But under local rules in the Eastern District of Virginia, the defense had 14 days to respond. Sunday night with no warning, the government asked the Judge to require a quicker response. One problem, the government was out of time to make that request to expedite under local rules. Monday evening, Judge Michael Nachmanoff denied that request on that basis—an embarrassing error for a U.S. Attorney to make and one that suggests she is still operating without the counsel of anyone familiar with the local rules in her district.

But the story doesn’t stop there, because in her motion to expedite, Halligan came out with a startling explanation for why she needed to fast track the filter team process. She alleged that Comey defense lawyer Fitzgerald had been complicit with Comey in an improper disclosure of classified information in the past. She argued that meant Fitzgerald has a conflict and should possibly be disqualified from participating in the Comey’s defense.

For starters, the argument that Comey would have to be removed over such a conflict is just wrong. Even if Halligan had gotten it right (and she didn’t), this is the kind of conflict Comey could waive if he wanted Fitzgerald to stay on as his lawyer.

But more importantly, Halligan got the facts wrong. And Fitzgerald promptly fired back, writing that the government’s claim that Comey used him “to improperly disclose classified information” and the government’s implicit assertion that Comey and Fitzgerald were involved in criminal activity together is “provably false” based on publicly available information.

The defense offered two main reasons as to why the Judge should reject Halligan’s motion to expedite:

• Comey is entitled to all the time the rules provide him with with to respond. The defense wrote that “based on the defense’s review to date, it appears that the government’s continued review of the materials is unlawful.” They couched the argument as “it appears”, because it’s not at all clear in the government’s motion what they want to look at and prosecutors declined, before filing their filter team motion, to discuss it with the defense, as prosecutors typically do, to see if they could work out an agreed upon process.

Comey’s argument is heavily redacted. He explains why in a footnote: “The government designated discovery containing some of the information in these sentences as Protected Materials under the Protective Order in this case. Although the defense sees no reason why this information cannot be made public, out of an abundance of caution, the defense is redacting these sentences from public filing in the first instance.” That makes it difficult to understand all the details here, but we can piece together enough to support the defense’s conclusion that they share “the government’s desire to avoid delay. But that desire does not give the government license to conduct an unlawful review or run roughshod over Mr. Comey’s privilege.”

• The government’s defamatory comments accusing Comey’s lawyer, Fitzgerald, of committing a crime with him fail to provide a basis for granting the government’s motion to expedite. The implicit allegations against Comey and Fitzgerald appear to stem from events shortly after Comey was fired by Donald Trump. Fitzgerald seems to have been among Comey’s lawyers, and Comey shared some memos with him, after scrutinizing them to make sure they didn’t contain classified information (Comey, as head of the FBI, would have been the classifying authority).

At a later date, the government “upclassified” some information to “confidential”—the lowest level of classification. Upon learning this had taken place, Comey had his lawyers contact the FBI to advise them they were in possession of material that had been newly reclassified. It took the FBI months to get back to them, quite an indication of how important they thought the information was, but Fitzgerald was ultimately asked to destroy it and did so immediately and voluntarily.

The defense makes their position clear: “The implicit assertion lead defense counsel and Mr. Comey engaged in criminal activity by doing so, is provably false and in any event provides no basis to grant the motion to expedite.”

They have the receipts. A 2019 Inspector General report concluded that there was no leaking of classified information to the press by either Comey or his counsel. “Full stop,” Fitzgerald writes.

DOJ declined to prosecute anyone over the allegations. In a footnote, we get a little more worthwhile detail about the upclassification. “The portion of the memorandum the review team determined should be classified as ‘Confidential’ concerned the President’s reference to then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s questionable judgment in not having notified the President sooner of a call from the leader of a particular country…In that context, President Trump compared certain countries to a smaller country and the upclassification treated the name of a smaller country as classified for fear of offending that country…Mr. Comey’s reaction to the upclassification was: ‘Are you guys kidding me?’…A federal court in unrelated litigation brought under the Freedom of Information Act (‘FOIA’) ultimately rejected all but one of the subsequent classifications…The classification of the memorandum has been addressed in subsequent litigation and the single word that remains ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ is the name of a single country.”

That vignette illustrates the abject weakness of Halligan’s claims about Fitzgerald.

The defense argued that Halligan lacked a good faith basis for the smear. It’s a reprehensible tactic for a federal prosecutor to use, something that would have had consequences in any other administration. There is little if any prospect of that happening here, short of referral to a bar grievance committee.

Halligan may have had some experience with the law surrounding filter teams, because she was at least tangentially involved in Trump’s efforts to prevent one from reviewing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago case so the government couldn’t use it against him. She is on the Supreme Court brief, although along with other lawyers, including people with both experience with filter teams and Supreme Court advocacy, so it’s unclear how much she participated in or learned from this process. But as she’s roundly criticized as being inexperienced, it’s only fair to point out she may have some here. Of course, that could also hurt her, as it means she should understand that violating the rules in this area can result in a taint that forces the removal of agents and/or prosecutors from a case if they’ve reviewed prohibited evidence.

The defense has until October 27 to formally respond to the government’s request to expedite. There are pitfalls everywhere for the unwary in criminal cases. Attorneys are like doctors. You probably wouldn’t see an obstetrician for brain surgery. An insurance lawyer may not be qualified to be a prosecutor. And in either setting, not sticking to your area of expertise can have fatal consequences, with doctors to the patients, with lawyers, to their cases.

Lindsey Halligan is no Pat Fitzgerald. The attempt to besmirch his reputation was a cheap shot, and one that will undoubtedly misfire. We’ve already seen the Senate balk at Trump’s choice of Ed Martin to be U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., and Alina Habba for New Jersey.

If Comey’s motion arguing Halligan was illegally appointed succeeds, it will fall to the local district court to appoint a suitable replacement. There are good reasons presidents aren’t permitted to appoint U.S. Attorneys without Senate confirmation (or judicial intervention in the case of undue delay). We’re seeing them on full display here. Trump may have set out to get revenge in this prosecution, but the defense is charting a different course.

Oct. 16

President Trump on Wednesday singled out people he wanted prosecuted. Looking on during the news conference were, from left, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general; Attorney General Pam Bondi; and Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

New York Times, News Analysis: Trump Names More Foes He Wants Prosecuted as Bondi and Patel Look On, Glenn Thrush, Oct. 16, 2025 (print ed.). Top officials, unwilling to fight for the independence of their institutions, watched on Wednesday as President Trump continued his pursuit of controlling law enforcement.

The nation’s three most powerful law enforcement officials — Attorney General Pam Bondi and her top deputy, Todd Blanche, along with Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director — padded into the Oval Office on Wednesday for a public show of unity and to herald some recent successes.

They left about an hour later, after President Trump tossed out, offhandedly, three names of people he wanted prosecuted: Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two criminal indictments against him; Andrew Weissmann, a former F.B.I. official who was a lead prosecutor for the team investigating the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia in the 2016 election; and Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Deranged Jack Smith, in my opinion, is a criminal,” he told the three administration officials, who have tried — with a few notable exceptions — to do what he wants.

They smiled, nodded and shuffled in place as he spoke.

“His interviewer was Weissmann — I hope they’re going to look into Weissmann, too — Weissmann’s a bad guy,” Mr. Trump added, referring to a recent event in which Mr. Smith appeared alongside Mr. Weissmann. “And he had somebody, Lisa, who was his puppet, worked in the office, really, as the top person. I think she should be looked at very strongly.”

It was a common enough example of second-term Trump theater-in-the-Oval. But it was also a diorama of the administration’s lopsided power dynamic between a president bent on controlling federal law enforcement and appointees unwilling or unable to fight for the historic independence of their institutions.

“Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on,” Mr. Smith told Mr. Weissmann in the Oct. 8 interview that captured Mr. Trump’s attention.

Why is this story labeled ‘News Analysis’? In this format, reporters with deep experience in the subject draw on their expertise to help you better understand an event. They step back from the breaking news to evaluate its significance and possible ramifications, but they may not inject their personal opinions.

“There are rules in the department about how to bring a case — follow those rules,” Mr. Smith added. “You can’t say: ‘I want this outcome. Let me throw the rules out.’”

The president, who vowed to go after the “scum” who once investigated him, often calls for investigations of people he hates, including Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen.

But those threats appear to be gaining legal force.

At Mr. Trump’s urging, and often over the objections of career prosecutors, the Justice Department recently secured indictments against the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the New York attorney general, Letitia James. Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche warned that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a conviction.

Charges in Maryland against John R. Bolton, a national security adviser during Mr. Trump’s first term, over whether he mishandled sensitive materials are likely to be filed soon, according to officials with knowledge of the situation.

That investigation, which began to gain momentum under the Biden administration, is regarded as more viable and grounded in evidence, in the view of former department officials with knowledge of the case. At Wednesday’s appearance in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump also reiterated his demand that the department go after Senator Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who pushed for his impeachment as a member of the House.

There was no pushback, or even an effort to downplay it. That was by design.

Mr. Trump, who tried with limited success to bring the bureau and Justice Department under his control during his first term, has left little to chance in his second.

By installing Mr. Patel and other loyalists into top federal law enforcement posts, he has not only ensured their compliance but also established a cadre of political surrogates and lock-step messengers willing to cast aside core departmental norms to serve his political agenda.

Oct. 15

The Bulwark Morning Shots, Political Opinion, Antifa Signs, Freshly Painted, William Kristol, right, Oct. 15, 2025. It’s getting worse.I mean this neither as an expression of hyperbole nor a cry of alarm. I mean this simply as a factual statement about where we are, less than a quarter of the way through the second Trump administration.

The fact is that Trump’s authoritarian apparatchiks are tightening their control over the key power ministries of the federal government. And they are getting more aggressive in asserting their power over the private sector and civil society.

So in the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi, below right, and FBI Director Kash Patel have abandoned all pretense that they are interested in something so old-fashioned as the rule of law.

They are directing that individuals against whom the president has a grievance be criminally prosecuted. And when told by subordinates—whether career lawyers or political appointees—that sound grounds for legal action don’t exist, they fire those honest attorneys and go ahead with the prosecution.

It’s not just the prosecutions of former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the firings of attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia who refused to bring those cases. It turns out that the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia, Todd Gilbert, a longtime Republican state legislator in Virginia until he was appointed by Trump in July, was forced to resign within a month of his appointment.

Why? Because he refused to overrule a career prosecutor who found no justification for criminal charges against those in the FBI who had looked into Russia’s attempt to help Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

But the administration is also moving well beyond targeting individuals against whom Trump has a grievance and those who won’t help the president act on those grievances. Any and all critics of the administration are now at risk of legal assault.

Following up on their earlier executive order and national security memorandum, the administration and its allies routinely claim that peaceful protests are controlled by “antifa”—which they in turn claim is a criminal and terrorist conspiracy. And they assert that such speech is a cover for and an incitement to violence. The administration is thus laying the groundwork for subjecting speech critical of it to suppression and prosecution.

There are indications that new crackdowns on dissent, on dissenters, and on the institutions that employ them and their funders, are imminent.

It’s of course comical when President Trump says, as he did yesterday, that

You see people holding this gorgeous sign with beautiful wood, beautiful cardboard, wood, everything, everything’s perfect, paint job, and they’re all the same. There are thousands of them, you know, that they weren’t made in the basement out of love. They were made by anarchists. Beware of the well-organized anarchists at work!

But what’s not comical, what is in fact sinister, is the assumption here that there would be something wrong if protest signs weren’t being made in basements but in print shops; and that it would be wrong to attempt to organize others who agree with their message. This is all protected speech.

But the president and his administration barely conceal any longer that they want to suppress both free speech and free political activity.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department continues to kill unidentified people on the high seas while providing neither evidence nor legal justification for doing so. And beginning today, media access to the Pentagon will be radically limited.So the Trump administration is becoming both increasingly aggressive and increasingly unaccountable.

Which brings me to the “No Kings” protests planned for Saturday. Several old friends have been amused that I seem to have become a defender and advocate of popular mobilization against the government. And several new friends have commented on the irony that I was a supporter of policies they protested in earlier times.

Fair enough. But we’re beyond irony and amusement. The administration’s campaign against a free society is intensifying. Congress, controlled by the Republican party, is acquiescent. The Supreme Court so far hasn’t been much of a barrier. And elites outside government are increasingly finding reasons to go along and get along.

The Founders tried to construct a government that featured all kinds of guardrails to protect liberty: separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances. They didn’t want to count too much on uncommon courage or wisdom from the people. As Federalist #51 puts it,

A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs…These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.

But the “auxiliary precautions” that were to supply “the defect of better motives” haven’t proved, in this crisis, up to the task.

We do ultimately depend on the common sense and common courage of the people. “No Kings” is an expression of protest. But it is also an affirmation of responsibility. We the people ordained and established our free government. It’s up to us to keep it.

New York Times, Part Enabler, Part Buffer: The Bind of the Justice Dept.’s No. 2, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, Updated Oct. 14, 2025. Todd Blanche, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, awakened one morning in late September to the news that his cheerful, at times insubordinate subordinate Ed Martin had blindsided him again.

Mr. Martin, given nearly free rein inside the department by President Trump to investigate perceived administration enemies, had sent a threatening letter to an ex-F.B.I. agent who had testified, years before, against the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for spouting lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.

A ticked-off Mr. Blanche, right, asked Mr. Martin: Why pick a pointless fight that would embarrass the administration on behalf of a fringe activist? He demanded that Mr. Martin rescind the letter, according to three people briefed on a phone call between the two men.

Mr. Martin, who had used his brief tenure as the top federal prosecutor in Washington to purge government lawyers who charged Jan. 6 rioters, complied.

Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, has helped usher in President Trump’s retribution campaign. But he faces anger on the right for resisting some of the most extreme measures.

Oct. 10

The Bulwark Morning Shots, Opinion: The Insidious Effort To Rationalize Trump’s Lawfare, William Kristol, right, and Andrew Egger, Oct. 10, 2025. This is not a president justified in going after those who went after him. It’s a person making a mockery of our justice system.

Donald Trump and Greg Abbott’s deployment of Texas National Guardsmen to Chicago has hit a legal wall—for now. A federal judge in Illinois handed down an order Thursday night temporarily blocking the deployment, saying she had seen “no credible evidence that there is a danger of a rebellion in the state of Illinois.”

How the president will respond remains to be seen. An appeal is all but certain, but Trump has also contemplated more extreme measures: If judges kept getting in his way, he said this week, he might just be forced to invoke the Insurrection Act. What a fun weekend activity, anticipating this!  

Democracy Docket, Opinion: The era political prosecutions has arrived, Marc Elias, right, Oct. 10, 2025. Yesterday’s indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James shocked many people who should hardly be surprised.

For months, I have complained that far too few people were taking Donald Trump’s threat to use the Department of Justice to prosecute his political opponents seriously. Even after this indictment, I fear too many will continue to underestimate the threat.

We are not approaching a constitutional crisis; we are in one. We are not risking authoritarianism; we are experiencing it. We are not crossing the Rubicon; that famous river is so far behind us that our shoes and clothes have completely dried during the journey.  

Legal AF via Substack, Commentary: Trump TERRIFIED as Pet Prosecutor GAMBLES with HER LAW LICENSE, Michael Popok, Oct. 10, 2025. Blind ambition is on full display, as Trump's pet Lindsey Halligan decides to take a job that under the ethics of her Bar License sheshould have turned down, and now that her independent judgment required has been compromised by her client Trump, she has put her law license at serious risk.

Popok explains that not only will James Comey's lawyers be filing a knock blow of a motion to disqualify her in the coming days, but she may head the list of Trump lawyers who have felony convictions and / or lost their bar licenses as well.

Oct. 9

 

Lincoln Square Media, The Collapse of Guardrails: America’s Rapid Democratic Erosion, Brian Daitzman, Oct. 9, 2025. In September, subpoenas, indictments, and Supreme Court rulings converged to shield the presidency and target its critics, revealing a constitutional rupture.

In September 2025, the constitutional crisis that has been building since Donald Trump’s first run for office in 2015 reached its most dangerous turn. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision granting sweeping presidential immunity, followed by its 2025 order allowing the executive to withhold billions in congressionally approved foreign aid, converged with high-profile arrests and subpoenas of Trump’s critics. Together, these moves have left a convicted felon president looming above the checks of all three branches of government. The guardrails the framers designed to contain authoritarian impulses are buckling, eroded by a politics of demagoguery and deception — the very danger they warned against in the Federalist Papers.

That crisis sharpened on the night of September 26, with a cascade of developments unprecedented in modern American history. The Justice Department issued a subpoena for travel records tied to Fani Willis, the Georgia prosecutor who once charged Trump. Hours earlier, former FBI director James Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury for alleged false statements and obstruction of Congress. Court filings revealed that federal agents had seized documents marked “classified” from the office of John Bolton, Trump’s onetime national security adviser turned critic. Rarely, if ever, has a sitting president’s circle of opponents faced such simultaneous legal jeopardy. A rupture in the American experiment, unfolding in real time.

The events of the end of September are extraordinary because they have no true analogy in American history.

The United States has seen bitter partisan conflict, from Jefferson and Adams to McCarthy and Watergate, but never has the machinery of federal justice moved in concert against multiple perceived political opponents of a sitting president at once. That inversion defines September 2025: prosecutors, investigators, and regulators who previously challenged Donald Trump now face subpoenas, indictments, or removal efforts.

This is not coincidence.

It is the outcome of a legal and institutional shift that began with the Supreme Court’s Trump v. United States ruling in 2024, which granted presidents broad immunity for official acts. And it is deepened by the Court’s decision just this Friday to allow the administration to withhold nearly $4 billion in foreign aid despite congressional appropriation, eroding Congress’s oldest power: the power of the purse.

Together these actions mark not just political conflict but democratic decline. What James Madison described as ambition checking ambition is failing. The scaffolding is giving way. America is watching the collapse of its guardrails not in history books, but in the present tense.The Unprecedented Targeting of a President’s Opponents

The United States has experienced political vendettas before, but never this: the sitting president’s critics and former accusers facing indictments and subpoenas within the same week. Fani Willis is the elected district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, and in 2023 she indicted Donald Trump and 18 allies under the state’s racketeering statute for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. That case collapsed in 2025 after Georgia’s Supreme Court disqualified her for a conflict of interest tied to a relationship with a deputy prosecutor. On September 26, she received a federal subpoena for her travel records. The timing is stark: the prosecutor of a president is now herself the target of federal inquiry.

James Comey’s path is equally emblematic. Appointed FBI director by Barack Obama in 2013 and retained by Trump, he was fired in 2017 after publicly confirming that the Bureau was investigating links between Russia and Trump’s campaign. He later became one of Trump’s most visible critics in print and on television. On September 26, 2025, the Department of Justice indicted him on charges of obstruction and false statement. Supporters of the indictment say it proves no one is above the law. Critics see it as revenge seven years in the making.

Trump’s defenders will say this is accountability, not revenge, and Trump himself will argue he is the victim. The public record cuts the other way. During the Biden administration, the president’s son, Hunter Biden, stood trial and was convicted by a jury on three federal gun charges in June 2024. The special counsel probing President Biden’s handling of documents issued a detailed report and recommended no charges, noting cooperation and interviews under oath.

By contrast, Trump fires officials who resist him, demands prosecutions of named rivals, and now presides over a Justice Department that indicts his former FBI director while federal agents search the office of a former national security adviser turned critic. The pattern is not symmetrical. One administration subjected its own family to a lawful process and accepted an adverse verdict. The other seeks to criminalize its opponents while insulating the presidency itself.

John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, resigned in 2019 after disputes over Iran and Afghanistan and went on to publish a memoir, The Room Where It Happened, that accused Trump of misconduct in office. Court filings now link his office to classified documents. George Soros, the Hungarian-born financier who funds voting access, civil society, and progressive causes, has long been a favorite target of Trump’s allies. Reports indicate prosecutors are being pressed to consider charges against him. And Lisa Cook, an economist confirmed to the Federal Reserve Board in 2022, is under DOJ investigation and a White House filing that seeks her removal. She is the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, and her independence has made her a visible counterweight to Trump’s economic agenda.

Each case differs in substance, but together they create a picture without precedent: the machinery of justice trained not on the president but on his political opponents. Hannah Arendt warned that authoritarianism begins when independence is redefined as disloyalty. That redefinition is unfolding now, as the critics of yesterday become the defendants of today.

Takeaway: Never before has an American president’s adversaries faced simultaneous prosecution. The inversion marks a constitutional rupture, visible in the present tense.  

Oct. 8 

New York Times, How Trump Is Using the Justice Department to Target His Enemies, Alan Feuer and Lily Boyce, Oct. 8, 2025. From the moment Donald J. Trump began his campaign to return to the White House, he has expressed a clear desire to seek vengeance against his enemies.

He has complained relentlessly about the multiple cases filed against him during the Biden administration and has used them as a justification for seeking retribution, arguing that the Justice Department was “weaponized” against him under his predecessor.

In power, Mr. Trump has now weaponized the department to his own ends, critics say, in a more direct manner than any president since the Nixon era. His calls for prosecutors to file criminal charges against his adversaries have eroded the Justice Department’s decadeslong tradition of independence from the White House and threatened the rule of law.

The Justice Department, now led by Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyers, has fired dozens of career prosecutors, many of whom had worked on cases involving Mr. Trump. And the president and his allies have targeted or pushed out several U.S. attorneys as he seeks quick movement on cases involving a number of his foes.

Each of the targets Mr. Trump has pursued through the Justice Department has denied wrongdoing, in statements or through lawyers. Here is a look at them:

• James Comey, Former FBI Director
• Open Society Foundations: Global grant network founded by George Soros
• Fani Willis: District attorney Fulton County, Ga.
• John O. Brennan: Former C.I.A. director
• Adam B. Schiff, Senator, Democrat of California
• Letitia James. Attorney general of New York

Oct. 7

Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2025, U.S. Department of Justice.

Lawfare, Analysis: The Comey Indictment and Selective or Vindictive Prosecution, Ema Rose Schumer, Oct. 7, 2025. A primer on the powerful legal tools and the high evidentiary burden placed on defendants to use them successfully.

The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey on charges of making false statements to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding touched off furious allegations and widespread concern that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is pursuing a campaign of personal retribution.

Days before a grand jury indicted Comey, Trump urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring criminal charges against Comey and several of the president’s Democratic rivals, writing on Truth Social, “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” The president fired off the post a day after the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia resigned, reportedly for refusing to bring the case against Comey due to inadequate evidence.

Analysts have observed that these facts offer Comey potentially powerful tools in defending against his prosecution—claims of selective or vindictive prosecution. These claims, which are brought in the form of motions to dismiss, are intended to provide legal remedies to certain types of prosecutorial misconduct.

But it is notoriously difficult for defendants to prevail on selective and vindictive prosecution motions. The executive branch enjoys broad prosecutorial discretion under long-standing interpretations of the Constitution’s Take Care Clause. And under the presumption of regularity, a general principle applied to cases involving executive discretion, courts presume that “in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary,” officials “have properly discharged their official duties.”

Still, courts have recognized certain constitutional constraints on the executive branch’s power to prosecute individuals—specifically, the protections afforded to criminal defendants under the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause. Selective prosecution motions invoke the former; vindictive prosecution motions invoke the latter. In practice, both kinds of claims are difficult to prove and involve burdensome doctrinal hoops. Whether Comey would succeed on either claim, then, is far from certain.

What Is Vindictive Prosecution?

Vindictive prosecution arises when a prosecutor uses the charging system to penalize a defendant for having exercised his legal rights. The Supreme Court stated in a 1978 case involving a claim of vindictive prosecution that to punish someone “because he has done what the law plainly allows him to do is a due process violation of the most basic sort.”

To succeed on a vindictive prosecution claim, a defendant must either (a) prove that a prosecutor actually charged the defendant to retaliate against the individual for exercising his legal rights or (b) show facts sufficient to create a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness,” which creates a presumption the government must then rebut by justifying its charging decision.

In the absence of a presumption of vindictive motive, a defendant must show that charges were brought solely to punish him and could not be justified on other grounds—an exacting standard.

The Supreme Court held in Bordenkircher v. Hayes that a prosecutor did not violate due process when he carried out a threat made during plea negotiations that he would seek to indict the defendant on a more serious charge if the defendant exercised his right to trial. The Court stated there is no element of punishment in the “give-and-take negotiation” of plea bargaining, where the prosecutor’s goal is to persuade a defendant to give up his right to a trial and the defendant is free to accept or reject the prosecutor’s offer.

Even if a defendant does not provide actual evidence of a prosecutor’s retaliatory motive, the Supreme Court in Blackledge v. Perry established that a defendant can make out a vindictive prosecution claim by presenting facts that “pose a realistic likelihood of vindictiveness.” The Supreme Court subsequently framed its decision in Blackledge as creating a “legal presumption of prosecutorial vindictiveness,” which the government can rebut by justifying the reasons for its charging decision.

In the Blackledge case, the Supreme Court held that a presumption of vindictive motive arose when a prosecutor secured a felony indictment against a defendant convicted of a misdemeanor after the defendant received a new trial before a higher court. The Supreme Court reasoned that the opportunities for vindictiveness were significant in situations where a prosecutor with “a considerable stake” in discouraging a defendant from exercising his right to appeal his conviction has the ability to deter such appeals by “upping the ante”—filing more serious charges. The Blackledge court suggested in a footnote that it would not have dismissed the felony charge if the prosecution had shown it was “impossible to proceed on the more serious charge at the outset.”

Notably, the presumption of vindictiveness generally does not apply in a pretrial setting. In United States v. Goodwin, the Supreme Court held that changes in charging decisions during the early stages of criminal proceedings are less likely the result of retribution and more likely the result of developing understandings of the significance of a case.

Attorneys for Trump argued in 2023 that his indictment in the election interference case should be dismissed for vindictive prosecution, calling the case “a straightforward retaliatory response to” Trump’s constitutional right to criticize the government. They argued specifically that Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith filed federal charges against Trump in the District of Columbia after Trump had exercised his constitutional right to plead not guilty in a criminal case in Florida, which was also brought by the special counsel.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan denied the motion, ruling that under the totality of the circumstances, Trump had failed to meet the threshold standard that his indictment was “more likely than not attributable to the vindictiveness on the part of the Government.”

Trump, the judge stated, did not “proffer a single evidentiary link between” his indictment and his public criticism of the 2020 election and then-President Joe Biden. Factors Chutkan weighed against Trump’s argument that the government retaliated against him for pleading not guilty in the Florida case were the distinct, independent bases of the prosecutions in Florida and D.C.—the Florida case pertained to Trump’s handling of classified documents, while the case in D.C. pertained to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results—and the Supreme Court’s holding in Goodwin that a change in charging decision after a defendant exercises a pretrial procedural right is insufficient to create a presumption of vindictive motive. The holding was not tested on appeal because the Justice Department later dismissed all charges against Trump.

More recently, one federal district court judge found the Trump administration’s actions in another criminal case created a presumption of vindictive prosecution. A U.S. district judge in Tennessee held on Oct. 3 that the circumstances surrounding the indictment of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an immigrant wrongfully deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador and then brought back to the United States to face fresh criminal charges, created a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness.” Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. ordered discovery and an evidentiary hearing in the case.

The judge found that Abrego Garcia’s attorneys offered facts sufficient to establish a presumption of vindictiveness by (a) showing the government had a “significant stake” in retaliating against Abrego Garcia for legally challenging his deportation and (b) showing the prosecution’s actions were unreasonable. Regarding the latter, the judge highlighted the timing of the government’s actions. Abrego Garcia’s indictment on charges of conspiracy and unlawfully transporting noncitizens centered around a Homeland Security investigation into a 2022 traffic stop in which Abrego Garcia was discovered driving individuals who were in the country illegally. Homeland Security’s investigation into Abrego Garcia remained pending for more than two years, closed—without referral for prosecution—three days before the government deported him to El Salvador, and reopened a week after the Supreme Court affirmed a district court order requiring the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.

The judge pointed to administration officials’ own words as strongly suggestive of their vindictive motive. “Most tellingly,” the judge noted, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche “strikingly” stated during a television interview that the government reopened its investigation into Abrego Garcia after a judge presiding over Abrego Garcia’s lawsuit challenging his removal ruled against the government—direct evidence connecting the government’s prosecution to Abrego Garcia’s exercise of his legal right. While those comments “could directly establish” prosecutors indicted Abrego Garcia to retaliate against him, the judge stated the defendant had sufficiently met the lower standard of proving a presumption of vindictiveness that entitled him to discovery and a hearing.

Comey will have to prove as a threshold matter that his indictment was “more likely than not attributable to the vindictiveness on the part of the Government.” Comey’s lawyers may argue that Trump’s Truth Social post provides direct evidence that the prosecution against Comey was motivated by animus, and but for such animus, the Department of Justice would not have indicted Comey. Two factors weigh in Comey’s favor: first, Trump has publicly railed against Comey for nearly a decade because the former FBI director opened an investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign; and second, the U.S. attorney investigating Comey was forced out of his role because he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to bring charges. Even if those facts established a presumption of vindictive motive, the government must show only that there were legitimate reasons for its conduct.

What Is Selective Prosecution?

Selective prosecution occurs when the government pursues criminal charges against a defendant not in response to the alleged criminal conduct, but for invidious purposes, such as targeting individuals because of their religion, race, or other impermissible factors. The Supreme Court stated in Oyler v. Boles that “the decision to prosecute may not be deliberately based upon an unjustifiable standard such as race, religion, or other arbitrary classifications.”

Rooted in the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the doctrine embodies the constitutional principle that the government may not single out one defendant for prosecution while overlooking others who engaged in the same conduct, unless it has a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for doing so. The Supreme Court first articulated this principle in 1886, holding that a selective prosecution claim arises when the law is “directed so exclusively against a particular class of persons” and applied “with a mind so unequal and oppressive” that the prosecution amounts to “a practical denial of equal protection of law.”

To establish a selective prosecution claim, the Supreme Court in Wayte v. United States articulated a two-part test: A defendant must demonstrate that the prosecutorial discretion (a) caused a discriminatory effect and (b) was driven by a discriminatory purpose.

To prove the prosecution’s discriminatory effect, the defendant must show that the prosecution did not indict a “similarly situated” individual. In the landmark case United States v. Armstrong, the Supreme Court explained that a person is considered similarly situated when they are in comparable circumstances, such as having engaged in the same criminal conduct while subject to the same state or local laws. In Armstrong, the defendants, who were indicted on charges of selling drugs and discharging a firearm, contended that the prosecution was racially selective. The Supreme Court held the defendants failed to satisfy the first prong because they produced no evidence that individuals of a different race who engaged in similar conduct were not prosecuted for the same offenses.

To satisfy the second prong of a selective prosecution claim—discriminatory purpose—a defendant must show that the prosecution was brought “because of” a protected characteristic or activity, and not merely “in spite of” it. In Wayte, which involved a 1980 draft registration law, the claimant argued he was criminally charged for failing to register for the draft because of his protest activities. The Supreme Court found, however, that the government applied draft-registration laws uniformly, prosecuting all reported nonregistrants without imposing any special burden on anti-war protesters. The petitioner thus failed to prove the prosecution was brought because of the defendant’s political activities and the second prong of discriminatory purpose was not satisfied.

Notably, the Armstrong court underscored the broad discretion afforded to prosecutors and imposed a high evidentiary burden on defendants. Concerned that allowing unfounded or speculative claims could impose heavy burdens on the executive branch and chill legitimate law enforcement efforts, the Court required defendants to present “clear evidence” of both discriminatory effect and purpose before obtaining discovery. The central paradox of this rule is that defendants are required to prove the prosecution’s intent, which is often inaccessible without discovery, before discovery is granted, leading some legal scholars to characterize the rule as a “Catch-22” dilemma. Indeed, selective prosecution motions, in practice, have proven largely illusory; defendants have prevailed in approximately three dozen cases over the past 50 years.

The difficulty prevailing on selective prosecution claims was illustrated recently in United States v. Rundo, a case against members of the white supremacist group Rise Above Movement (RAM) who were indicted for conspiracy to violate the Anti-Riot Act and for substantively violating the Act after violently attacking counterprotesters. The district court dismissed the indictment on selective prosecution grounds; however, on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed.

According to the appellate court, the defendant failed to satisfy either prong of the selective prosecution test. He argued that far-left Antifa members present at the same protests were not prosecuted, but the Court found that they were, in fact, prosecuted for their own offenses. Thus, the defendant failed to show discriminatory effect because others who were similarly situated were also prosecuted.

The Ninth Circuit also rejected the argument that the timing of the arrests, occurring after the death of a left-wing protester, indicated improper motive, thus finding no discriminatory purpose. The Court stated that the federal government “is permitted to set its own ‘enforcement priorities’ and create an overall ‘enforcement plan’ if it has a legitimate reason to do so.”

In a selective prosecution claim, Comey will face significant hurdles proving the discriminatory effect of the Justice Department’s indictment and the government’s discriminatory purpose—“clear evidence” of which is required to access discovery.

Demonstrating discriminatory effect through “similarly situated” individuals will be particularly challenging for Comey, as courts demand they be nearly identical in relevant circumstances. But Trump’s Truth Social post from Sept. 20 may serve as potential evidence of discriminatory purpose. Trump’s demand that Bondi prosecute Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), paired with his reference to his own criminal cases, could serve as evidence that the Trump administration is targeting individuals for prosecution because they are the president’s political opponents. The government could counter that Trump’s tweet undermines a discriminatory effect argument, as the inclusion of multiple individuals shows that prosecution is not limited solely to Comey.

Comey might also point to the timing of the indictment, which was secured just before the statute of limitations was set to expire. Yet, as the Ninth Circuit in Rundo emphasized, the government maintains broad discretion in setting its enforcement priorities and timing alone is insufficient to establish bias.

***

Trump’s public pressure on his Justice Department to aggressively prosecute his political enemies may provide an avenue for Comey to challenge his indictment on grounds of vindictive and selective prosecution.

That the facts surrounding Comey’s prosecution are dissimilar to those of traditional vindictive and selective prosecution claims does not foreclose challenges to his indictment on such grounds. Indeed, Trump’s public comments have shattered norms that the White House refrains from commenting on active Justice Department investigations. Nonetheless, they may be insufficient to prove selective and vindictive prosecution given the high evidentiary burden placed on defendants to overcome courts’ presumption that law enforcement exercises discretion in good faith.

 

Comey Prosecution: In Depth

 

 

November

Nov. 4

Lawfare, The Situation Analysis: Where’s the Lie? Benjamin Wittes and Anna Bower, Nov. 4, 2025. The government’s response to James Comey’s vindictive prosecution raises one very big and important question.

The Situation on Friday outlined James Comey’s defense based on the numerous motions his lawyers have filed in his criminal case so far.

Yesterday, the prosecution outlined its own case.

Spoiler alert: That case is unspeakably, breathtakingly devoid of merit. To see it laid out in all its patchwork threadbaredness is to gasp with embarrassment for the prosecutors who have presented this to an American court. It is to understand why no career prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia would work this case and why Interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan had to import two sacrificial lambs from North Carolina to litigate the matter. To read it is to spend 48 pages understanding the depth of corruption in the Justice Department in the second Trump administration.

The context for the department fleshing out its charges against Comey is the government’s response to Comey’s motion to dismiss the case as a selective and vindictive prosecution. (Disclosure: Comey is a friend of one of the present authors and has written for Lawfare both as FBI director and in his subsequent life as a private citizen. He contributed no information to this article.)

The government’s brief warrants note for a variety of reasons, and not just because one of the present authors makes a cameo appearance in it on page 5 as “Individual 2.” (The reference is to this innocuous email of Oct. 30, 2016 that refers, in turn, to this Lawfare article from the previous day, written with “Individual 1,” who is also known as Jack Goldsmith.)

But the brief’s most striking feature is not actually its arguments on the merits of Comey’s motion. Here, the government—faced with a record of presidential animus toward a defendant and a series of resulting procedural irregularities in the case unparalleled in the entire legal history of the United States—does more or less what one might expect.

• It argues that the legal standard for granting such a motion is high, which is true.
• It argues that the president of the United States was not the decision-maker in the indictment of Comey, which is laughably untrue.
• It argues that any animus Trump might have expressed over the years towards Comey is merely a reflection of Trump’s righteous indignation that the former FBI director—for so the brief argues—leaked stuff and lied about it to Congress.
• It argues that there’s no “direct” evidence that Trump ordered the prosecution of Comey, despite his having declared publicly that he was removing the relevant U.S. attorney because he would not bring the case (and that of Letitia James) and installing a woman who would do just that.
• And it argues that there’s no evidence that Trump and Halligan are retaliating against Comey by prosecuting him for his exercise of some legal right.

Some of these arguments are audaciously meritless; some provide genuine doctrinal puzzles that the judge will have to work through. None of them, however, is what ultimately makes the brief interesting.

The interesting aspect of the brief, rather, is its account of the government’s substantive case against Comey.

The Comey indictment was notably devoid of facts. Few federal indictments of prominent figures have ever “spoken” less. So it was only a matter of time before the government had to spell out what precise statement it would endeavor to prove to a unanimous jury beyond a reasonable doubt constituted a lie to Congress and an effort to obstruct a congressional investigation—and what underlying conduct demonstrated its falsity. In this brief, the government for the first time does that.

So let’s go through the facts as alleged by the government, and let’s see if we can find a false statement to Congress in them.

,,,,

And that is all there is. You can pour over this brief all day long, and you won’t find anything else suggesting that Comey’s Senate testimony on May 3, 2017 was false—or that his standing by that testimony five years less three days before his indictment was false.

All of which raises the question: Where’s the lie?

October 

Oct. 20

Emptywheel, Analysis: Lindsey Halligan Lectures Someone ELSE about Conflicts, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 20, 2025. The loaner prosecutors doing Lindsey Halligan's dirty work are insinuating that Patrick Fitzgerald -- and not Halligan herself (shown above) -- has a conflict on this case.

A filing in the Jim Comey case bearing the name of Lindsey Halligan claims that it is very important to disclose conflicts as early as possible.

1 “[Bo]th the Sixth Amendment and the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct invite, indeed compel, prosecutors to alert a trial court to a defense attorney’s potential or actual conflict.” United States v. Cortez, 205 F. Supp. 3d 768, 775 (E.D. Va. 2016) (emphasis added) (Ellis, J.); see also United States v. Howard, 115 F.3d 1151, 1155 (4th Cir. 1997) (Wilkinson, C.J.) (noting that a district court “has an obligation to foresee problems over representation that might arise at trial and head them off beforehand”).

Only, the filing is not disclosing conflicts that Halligan, the Trump personal defense attorney turned unlawfully appointed US Attorney who didn’t identify her client at the arraignment, might have.

Rather, in a bid to accelerate consideration of the loaner prosecutors’ filter request (which I wrote about here), it insinuates that Pat Fitzgerald, right, has a possible conflict on this case. As it describes, some of the communications that (it all but confirms) Dan Richman designated as privileged back in 2019 include Fitzgerald.

Relevant to this motion, the attorney has informed the government that the quarantined evidence contains communications between the defendant and several attorneys. The current lead defense counsel appears to be a party to some of these communications.

To turn that into a potential conflict, the loaner prosecutors (and probably also James Hayes, who again shows as the author of the document, but who has not filed a notice of appearance in the case) wildly misrepresent the DOJ IG Report on Jim Comey’s retention of the memos he wrote memorializing his conversations with Trump.

[T]he defendant used current lead defense counsel to improperly disclose classified information.2

2 See U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG), Report of Investigation of Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s Disclosure of Sensitive Investigative Information and Handling of Certain Memoranda, Oversight and Review Division Report 19-02, (August 2019), (located at https://web.archive.org/web/20250818022240/https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/o1902.pdf, last accessed October 19, 2025).

(They provide a Wayback Machine link, because Trump killed the DOJ IG site in his bid to kill the main Inspector General organization.)

While the IG Report describes that Comey sent Fitzgerald four of the memos — which Comey believed to be unclassified — he sent the memo that Richman shared for this NYT story separately, meaning the report does not substantiate the claim that Fitzgerald was in the loop on that story.

May 14, 2017

Comey sends scanned copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 from his personal email account to the personal email account of one of his attorneys, Patrick Fitzgerald. Before sending, Comey redacts the second paragraph from Memo 7 involving foreign affairs because Comey deems it irrelevant. On May 17 Fitzgerald forwards these four Memos to Comey’s other attorneys, David Kelley and Richman (right).

May 16, 2017

Comey sends a digital photograph of Memo 4 (describing the meeting in which Comey wrote that President Trump made the statement about “letting Flynn go”) to Richman via text message from Comey’s personal phone. Comey asks Richman to share the contents, but not the Memo itself, with a specific reporter for The New York Times. Comey’s stated purpose is to cause the appointment of a Special Counsel to ensure that any tape recordings that may exist of his conversations with President Trump are not destroyed. Richman conveys the substance of Memo 4 to the reporter. The New York Times publishes an article entitled “Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation.”

[snip]

As described in this section, on May 14, 2017, Comey transmitted copies of Memos 2, 4, and 6, and a partially redacted copy of Memo 7 to Fitzgerald, who was one of Comey’s personal attorneys. Comey told the OIG he thought of these Memos as his “recollection recorded,” like a diary or personal notes. Comey also said he believed “there’s nothing classified in here,” and so he thought he could share them with his personal attorneys.And even using the FBI classification review of the memos he shared rather than Comey’s own review (he was an Original Classification Authority), he shared just six words, classified “Confidential” with his attorneys, and Richman didn’t share that information with Mike Schmidt.

FBI conducts a classification review of Comey’s Memos. The FBI determines that Comey correctly classified Memo 1 (which Comey did not share with anyone outside the FBI); that Memos 4, 5, and 6 are unclassified but “FOUO”; and that portions of Memos 2, 3, and 7 are classified, as follows:

Memo 2: Six words from a statement by President Trump comparing the relative importance of returning telephone calls from three countries, one of which the Memo notes the President mentioned twice, are classified as “CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN.” Comey did not redact this information before sharing Memo 2 with his attorneys.Memo 3: Information about sources, methods, investigative activity, and foreign relations is classified as “SECRET//NOFORN.” Comey did not share Memo 3 with anyone outside the FBI.Memo 7: An assessment of a foreign leader by President Trump and discussion of foreign relations is classified as “CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN.” Comey redacted this paragraph before he sent Memo 7 to his attorneys.

As Comey’s response notes, in a subsequent FOIA, a judge determined just one word was Confidential.

6 The portion of the memorandum the review team determined should be classified as “Confidential” concerned the President’s reference to then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s questionable judgment in not having notified the President sooner of a call from the leader of a particular country. (Report at 44). In that context, President Trump compared certain countries to a smaller country and the upclassification treated the name of a smaller country as classified for fear of offending that country. (Id. at 44-45). Mr. Comey’s reaction to the upclassification was: “Are you guys kidding me?” (Id. at 47). A federal court in unrelated litigation brought under the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) ultimately rejected all but one of the subsequent classifications. (Id. at 3 n.4; 47 n.78; 58 n.100 (citing Cable News Network, Inc., v. FBI, 384 F. Supp. 3d 19, 25-26, 36, 38 (D.D.C. 2019))). The classification of the memorandum has been addressed in subsequent litigation and the single word that remains “CONFIDENTIAL” is the name of a single country.

That is, even Richman didn’t release classified information here. There’s even less to suggest Fitzgerald did.

The loaner prosecutors (and James Hayes) just made that up. Which is what Comey noted in a response.

[T]he government’s effort to defame lead defense counsel provides no basis to grant the motion.

[snip]

[T]here is no good faith basis for attributing criminal conduct to either Mr. Comey or his lead defense counsel. Similarly, there is no good faith basis to claim a “conflict” between Mr. Comey and his counsel, much less a basis to move to disqualify lead defense counsel.

Their goal in doing so is now clear: They want to get details of what Richman said while representing Comey after Richman had left and Comey, left, was fired from the FBI, a time period that is irrelevant to charges pertaining to what Richman did as an FBI employee.

And to do that, they’re treating the Comey Memos as akin to some kind of grand insurance fraud (the common crime behind the precedent they’re invoking to conduct a highly invasive privilege review), when it was quite legitimately something you would do — sharing your own memorialization of sensitive events — with a lawyer. Which is probably why, per the original filing, Comey plans to challenge the warrant to get to that material.

Their filing is at least disingenuous about something else. They claim they need Judge Nachmanoff to make a decision about this quickly so that they can meet their trial deadlines.

Prompt implementation of the filter protocol is necessary in this case so the current trial milestones are maintained and met. This has been a point of emphasis from the Court.

This desire is also shared by the government.

Here, the potentially protected material could contain exculpatory or inculpatory evidence relevant to the defense and the government. Currently, the government is not aware of the contents of the potentially protected material. As a party to some of the communications contained in the potentially protected material, the defense necessarily has awareness.

But this bid for a filter team already necessarily disrupts the trial deadlines.

As I pointed out here, the current schedule — especially the “the fastest CIPA process you have ever seen in your lives” that Judge Nachmanoff ordered at the arraignment — presumes that Fitzgerald will get clearance quickly.

The schedule proposed by the parties assumes that attorney Patrick Fitzgerald receives his security clearance, or interim clearance, within a reasonable time, and that all the classified materials to be reviewed are made available to the defense within a reasonable time.

You don’t agree to that CIPA schedule and then decide you want to kick Fitzgerald off the case. At that point, you’re effectively fucking with Comey’s Speedy Trial right. If you, as prosecutors, are compelled to identify conflicts, you’re compelled to do so before you build an entire trial schedule around there not being one.

And you especially don’t get to do that when this material has been in DOJ custody since 2019.

If there were reason to believe the discussions that Comey memorialized about Trump’s attempt to kill the Russian investigation included evidence of a crime, Bill Barr would have pursued it back in 2020. He didn’t.

And yet now the loaner prosecutors want to delay Comey’s trial so they can make a mad bid to get material that was clearly privileged. 

 

Oct. 17

The Bulwark, Conway Explains: John Bolton Chose a Book Over Saving the Country, George Conway Explains It All (ToSarah Longwell), Oct. 17, 2025. George Conway explains to Sarah Longwell how the indictment of John Bolton fits into Donald Trump’s broader pattern of targeting critics — but also why Bolton’s case may have more substance than Trump’s other so-called “revenge prosecutions.”

They discuss what makes the Bolton charges different, the double standard around classified information, and how Trump’s effort to label peaceful protests as “rebellion” reveals his authoritarian instincts.

Legal AF, TIDE TURNS Against Trump as Comey SCORES EARLY WIN, Shan Wu, Oct. 17, 2025. It’s an early Halloween egging for Trump’s DOJ in the James Comey case as Comey’s defense team racks up an early win. Former federal prosecutor Shan Wu breaks down the nature of the win and it’s significance for the ongoing Comey prosecution just getting started.

Oct. 16

Emptywheel, Analysis: Tick Tock, Tick Tock: Lindsey Halligan’s Filter Follies, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 16, 2025. Lindsey Halligan's loaner prosecutors decided they'd ask for a filter protocol to access already seized material the day after Judge Nachmanoff ordered they provide all discovery to Jim Comey that same day. That may work out poorly for them.

The court filings submitted since Jim Comey’s arraignment have set the stage for several possible prosecutorial disasters.

After loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons made a transparent bid at the arraignment to slow Eastern District of Virginia’s rocket docket with both discovery and the invocation of the CIPA (Classified Information Procedurs Act) process, Judge Michael Nachmanoff, right:

• Enforced a discovery deadline of Monday over prosecutors’ attempts to stall

• Adopted Comey’s preferred protective order, rejecting prosecutorial efforts to limit Comey’s own access to discovery

• Approved a CIPA schedule that resolves by December (and therefore would not delay the January 5 trial date)

Meanwhile, Comey noticed his intent to challenge Lindsey Halligan’s appointment as US Attorney, so Judge Nachmanoff can refer the question to Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Albert Diaz, who will pick a District Judge from another District to preside over the challenge. Assuming Judge Diaz responds in timely fashion, Comey will submit that motion on Monday, along with his Selective and Vindictive prosecution claim, the latter of which is likely to be rather, um, illuminating.

There’s no sign, yet, that Halligan’s loaner AUSAs failed to meet Monday’s deadline, though they did file something under seal on Tuesday. If I had to guess, that might be the first bid to hide Trump’s role in the selective prosecution under claims of Executive Privilege, though I also imagine prosecutors may try to explicitly prevent the involvement of Maurene Comey (who is suing on closely related issues) or Troy Edwards (who presumably knows details of the turmoil at EDVA) on Comey’s defense team. Right wing propagandists are hinting that it might be a bid to claim Pat Fitzgerald has a conflict stemming from his past representation of Comey; but the CIPA filings, filed by prosecutors on February 13, are predicated on the assumption “that attorney Patrick Fitzgerald receives his security clearance, or interim clearance, within a reasonable time,” suggesting prosecutors have no complaint about Fitz’ involvement.

But there’s another filing that hints at far more turmoil ahead.

On Monday, after Judge Nachmanoff ordered prosecutors to turn over all discovery by 5 PM that day, prosecutors submitted a motion for a filter protocol. According to the filing, the government seized a whole bunch of computer devices — a hard drive, an iCloud account, an iPhone, and an iPad — from a lawyer in a past investigation, and they want to access it for this investigation.

Evidence in the government’s custody includes PPM because the evidence was obtained from an attorney. Currently, the quarantined evidence includes an image of a computer hard drive, an iCloud download, the backup of an iPhone, and the backup of an iPad (the “quarantined evidence”). The quarantined evidence was obtained through judicial warrants in a previous government investigation. After obtaining the quarantined evidence, and prior to any review, the attorney in question reviewed the quarantined evidence, withheld purported privileged material, and provided a privilege log to the government. However, the government is not aware of any involvement by the Defendant, or other putative privilege holders, in this prior review.

The devices are exceedingly likely to belong to Dan Richman, who is at least reported to be the person whom Comey is accused of authorizing to serve as an anonymous source in the indictment.

Indeed, the possibility that DOJ, under Bill Barr, seized a whole bunch of content from Richman explains something about the 2021 memo closing the investigation into Richman for leaking (which Comey likely received in unredacted form on Monday). One paragraph of the memo describes that Richman told the FBI that Comey had never asked him to talk to the media, followed by a two-paragraph redaction that must describe some reason why the FBI believed that to be false.

It was clear from the memo that the FBI obtained proof of what Richman said to Mike Schmidt, and while Barr tried to go after NYT directly for this investigation, they had limited success, so that evidence would have come from Richman. Plus, the closing memo is pretty clear that Richman was a confirming source for Schmidt (it says that the government has not previously charged people for being a confirming source, though I believe that’s inaccurate), which Richman admitted.

So if all those assumptions are correct, let’s consider what this motion for a filter protocol confesses.

First, prosecutors launched a bid to get access to this information to use at trial on the day that discovery was due, the day after Judge Nachmanoff ordered that all discovery be provided by October 13. They seem really unconcerned about how badly that will piss off Nachmanoff, which seems reckless.

The proposed filter itself is obnoxious in two ways. It proposes a team (which it says does not include EDVA or EDNC prosecutors, but does not address whether it includes prosecutors from WDVA or another of the far-flown parts of DOJ where Kash Patel has parked his witch hunt) will review the data for a set of narrow filter terms.

2 The Filter Team is comprised of Two Assistant United States Attorneys, and their support staff, from a separate federal district from the Eastern District of Virginia and the Eastern District of North Carolina. The Filter Team has a separate reporting and supervisory chain from the Prosecution Team and are not part of the Prosecution Team.

But aside from things explicitly marked privileged, they would get access to everything. Comey would only get a say over stuff triggered by those filter terms.

You can tell how unusual this protocol is for the citations — none of which is from EDVA, and only one of which is from the Fourth Circuit — the loaner AUSAs give to pretend it is not.

Of note, courts in the Fourth Circuit have entered similar protocols to the one proposed by the Filter Team in this case to handle the segregation and disclosure of PPM. See, e.g., United States v. Reifler, No. 1:20-cr-512-1, 2021 WL 2253134 (M.D.N.C. June 2, 2021).

Further, courts in other jurisdictions, including in the Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits, among others, have also entered similar protocols to the one proposed here. See, e.g., United States v. Farizani, No. 4:21-cr-62, ECF No. 153 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 16, 2024); United States v. Fletcher, No. 2:21-cr-64-DLB-CJS, 2022 WL 1118042 (E.D. Ky. Mar. 8, 2022); United States v. Siefert, No. 2:21-2-DLB-CJS, 2021 WL 3076940 (E.D. Ky. July 17, 2021); United States v. Salahaldeen, No. 3:20-cr-839, 2021 WL 2549197 (D.N.J. May 7, 2021); United States v. Lloyd and Strong, No. 9:25-cr-80015 (S.D. Fla.), United States v. Martinez and Vazquez, No. 24-cr20343, ECF No. 49 (S.D. Fla. Sep. 24, 2024); United States v. Blackman, No. 23-cr-20271, ECF No. 105 (S.D. Fla. Apr. 3, 2024); United States v. Waxman, No. 21-cr-60253, ECF No. 105 (Aug. 12, 2022).

These cases charged insurance fraud, healthcare fraud, distribution of controlled substances by a doctor, a combination of both fraud and controlled substance abuse, health care fraud, more healthcare fraud, and still more medicare fraud. They’re not only out of district, but inapt to this case.

They hide what prosecutors are probably attempting to do: to get to materials privileged to Richman in which he spoke about Comey.

This is something I predicted prosecutors would try to do in a post and video on the lessons from the Durham investigation. This is an attempt to use this proceeding to get to stuff privileged to Richman that they could use in their conspiracy fever dream.

The other reason this is wildly inappropriate goes to something Nachmanoff seems to be attentive to. As I noted, in his order approving Comey’s preferred protective order, Judge Nachmanoff noted that cases brought by Pat Fitzgerald, Robert Mueller, and under the supervision of Jack Smith did not adopt the punitive standard the Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s loaner AUSAs are attempting.

1 The Court observes that protective orders entered in numerous other high-profile false statements cases, within and outside of this judicial district, do not contain such limitations. See, e.g., Protective Order, United States v. McDonnell, et al., ECF 46, No. 3:14-cr-12-JRS (E.D. Va. Feb. 6, 2014); Protective Order, United States v. Kiriakou, ECF 32, No. 1:12-cr-127-LMB (E.D. Va. April 13, 2012); United States v. Libby, ECF 22, No. 1:05-cr-394-RBW (D.D.C. Nov. 23, 2005); Protective Order, United States v. Blagojevich, ECF 67, No. 1:08-cr-888-JBZ (N.D. Ill. April 14, 2009); Protective Order, United States v. Manafort, et al., ECF 46, No. 1:17-cr-201-ABJ (D.D.C. Nov. 15, 2017).

If one were to adopt the attorney-client review standards used in the Trump cases, the attorney in question — Rudy Giuliani, and John Eastman, among others, in the Trump cases, and Richman here — would be involved to speak to their own privilege, a process which created months and months of delay. The loaner AUSAs are pretty transparently trying to find a way around that process.

For now, Comey is adopting a different approach. As prosecutors describe it, Comey plans to challenge the warrant accessing this data in the first place.

First, the defendant has not explicitly objected to the protocol. As the government understands it, the defense prefers to challenge the underlying search warrant first before any review takes place. This two-tiered process is unacceptable in the government’s view because it risks delay.

It makes sense. The closing document in the investigation into Richman found that there was not sufficient evidence to charge either Comey or Richman, including for the false statements with which Comey has now been charged.

The investigation has not yielded sufficient evidence to criminally charge any person, including Comey or Richman, with making false statements or with the substantive offenses under investigation.

Unlike grand juries (where we can assume Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer neglected to tell grand jurors about all the conclusions there was not evidence to charge this), affiants for warrants are required to tell judges of all material information, such as that prosecutors already decided there’s no crime here. This is what the entire stink about the Carter Page FISA warrants was about. And the only thing that has changed since FBI presumably obtained warrants for Richman’s devices in 2019 is that Richman testified, twice, that Comey didn’t order him to leak to the press, and also that three sets of prosecutors (including those who reviewed the material in 2019) concluded there was no crime they could charge.

So if whoever got a new warrant to access this material for use in this investigation failed to disclose the prior prosecutorial decisions, that would make for an easy Fourth Amendment challenge. (I would be unsurprised if agents in WDVA already accessed this material, using precisely this protocol, which is one reason I find the language excluding EDVA and EDNC from the filter team but not identifying who would conduct it suspect.)

But understand what else is going on. The loaner prosecutors say they need to use an inapt filter process that treats both Comey and Richman like fraudsters because allowing them to participate in the process — or even pausing for a Fourth Amendment challenge — “risks delay.” But this is EDVA, home of the rocket docket, and in EDVA, you don’t wait until after you’ve indicted to obtain material you think might be helpful to your case.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

As far as I understand the posture of this, unless Judge Nachmanoff orders differently, Comey will not have to respond to the October 13 request for two weeks — October 27, with a reply a week later, after all of Comey’s initial pretrial motions are submitted (he might file a Fourth Amendment challenge for the second deadline, October 30, or just file it on October 26).

He seems unimpressed by either this motion or the sealed filing.

Which is to say, unless something changes, this purported filter process wouldn’t even start for another month, resulting in the provision of any relevant materials to Comey months after the discovery deadline.

If this is a bid to access this material for this trial, it will likely fail. And, because this is EDVA, if that’s what prosecutors are trying, it may not work as well for investigators (including Jack Eckenrode, from John Durham’s team) as it did during the Michael Sussmann trial.

Oct. 14

Legal AF, Trump PANICS as Judge PRESSES Ahead on SPEEDY COMEY TRIAL, Michael Popok, right, Oct. 14, 2025.  Oct. 14, 2025. As Former FBI Director James Comey comes out swinging and tells the Court it will be moving to cut the legs out from under Trump's pet Lindsey Halligan for being illegally appointed to her US Attorney position, the Judge tells Trump's DOJ that he will not allow them to play games with document and evidence production to delay the Jan5 trial. Popok ties it all together on his latest hot take.

MSNBC, Comey wins early discovery fight as judge finds Trump DOJ stance would cause needless delay, Jordan Rubin, Oct. 14, 2025. Accepting Lindsey Halligan's proposal, the judge wrote, “would unnecessarily hinder and delay Defendant’s ability to adequately prepare for trial.”

It’s early yet in the James Comey case, but the former FBI director got a quick win on a procedural issue that reinforces the presiding judge’s refusal to allow needless delay in the criminal case against the Donald Trump critic brought by a Trump-installed prosecutor.

That reinforcement came from U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, who rejected the Justice Department’s motion for a protective order that would’ve limited Comey’s access to discovery. The judge wrote that the Trump DOJ’s proposal “would unnecessarily hinder and delay Defendant’s ability to adequately prepare for trial.”

In a two-page order explaining his decision Monday, Nachmanoff, a Biden appointee sitting in the Eastern District of Virginia, noted that prior high-profile false statement cases didn’t have the sort of limitations the government proposed here. The judge added that the DOJ proposal didn’t sufficiently detail the information purportedly needing protection, thus making the request overbroad.

Though the decision on this one discrete issue doesn’t dictate how the case will end (heftier pretrial motions to dismiss are due later this month), its on-task tone is in keeping with the one Nachmanoff set at Comey’s arraignment last week, where the former lawman pleaded not guilty to the two-count indictment secured by former Trump personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan, over the objection of career prosecutors: one count for allegedly lying to Congress and another for allegedly obstructing Congress. At the arraignment, Nachmanoff approved a swift litigation schedule featuring a Jan. 5 trial date, which the judge said he had been prepared to set even sooner had the defense requested a December start date.

So whatever Halligan’s plan for the case is — to the extent she has one, not having prosecuted a case before — delay shouldn’t be a part of it. Just before Comey’s arraignment, she brought in two DOJ lawyers from North Carolina who have prosecuted cases before. She similarly secured an indictment last week against New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose prosecution Trump also called for like he did Comey’s. James is due to appear in court Oct. 24.

Oct. 12

Emptywheel, Analysis: “Sensitivities and Exposure:” Six Stupid Things about Lindsey Halligan’s First Filing, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D., right), Oct. 12, 2025. Lindsey the Insurance lawyer and her two loaner AUSAs didn't do so well on their first filing.

I already noted that, after Judge Michael Nachmanoff issued an order setting Monday as the deadline for prosecutors to provide Jim Comey all the discovery in his case, prosecutors submitted what they fashion as a Motion for a Discovery Order.

I was going to leave the filing well enough alone. Either Pat Fitzgerald or Judge Nachmanoff will respond later today, when things will get interesting. But there are a number of stupid things about the filing I can’t shake.

1) First, the prosecutors (it was submitted by Gabriel Diaz) do not fashion this as a motion for reconsideration. They just … pretend that Nachmanoff’s order doesn’t exist, and pretend they’re submitting this for the first time. That seems like a spectacular way to infuriate a judge.

2) They’re asking for two deadlines — October 14 for the things pertaining to the vindictive prosecution motion and October 20 for everything else, a transparent attempt to keep things from Comey,  left, that might be pertinent to his vindictive prosecution motion.

Part of their justification for filing this is that the parties had not reached an agreement and so they were following Nachmanoff’s order to submit competing versions on Monday.

On October 8, 2025, the Court ordered “the parties immediately confer regarding the entry of a joint discovery order” and further ordered “that if after good faith discussions the parties are unable to agree on and file a joint discovery order by Friday, October 10, 2025, . . . the parties shall each submit a proposed discovery order by Monday, October 13, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. D.E. 24.

But then, in a high school debate-worthy footnote, they suggest that Monday couldn’t be the deadline because it’s not five business days before the first pretrial motion deadline, since it’s a holiday.

Following the Court’s orders regarding discovery at docket entries 28 and 29, the Government conferred with Defense as to what the discovery deadline is. The Defense position was that, per the Court’s Order, discovery could have technically been due on Friday, October 10, 2025. But the notion that discovery was due prior to the Court entering a discovery order is not plausible. Alternatively, the Defense identified October 13, 2025, as the due date. This date is a Federal Holiday and is also inconsistent with the discovery order from this Court that lists discovery as due five business days before the pretrial motion deadline.

You’re already treating Monday as a business day!! Your entire premise here — that Fitzgerald, right, should have held off on filing until Monday — is that you’re working on Monday.

3) Elsewhere — apparently in an attempt to suggest they were being really nice by letting Comey submit a second set of pretrial motions on October 30 — they describe that the default pretrial motion deadline going into last week’s hearing would have been October 22.

The defendant requested, the government agreed, and the Court ordered two motions Deadlines, October 20, 2025, and October 30, 2025. Notably, EDVA Local Criminal Rule 12 states that pretrial motions should be filed within 14 days of the arraignment. Here, the 14 day deadline would have been October 22.

This amounts to a confession that the default deadline for discovery going into last week’s hearing would have been five business days before October 22, or October 17. Prosecutors provide no explanation why they need an extra five days simply because Comey has two sequential pretrial motions.

4) They describe that Comey wouldn’t discuss the discovery order on October 7 when — for the first in the 12 days since Comey had been indicted — prosecutors first reached out, because Comey’s team first demanded to know who the people described in the indictment were.

At that time, the government discussed with the defendant the proposed standard EDVA discovery agreement and a discovery protective agreement. At the initial discussion the defendant would not agree until the government provided information on the U.S. Attorney’s appointment and the identities of PERSON 1 and PERSON 3 on the Indictment.

Remember: Pat Fitzgerald said three different times in the arraignment the next day that he still hadn’t been told who these people were. So Diaz is effectively confessing that prosecutors wouldn’t — perhaps couldn’t — describe who these people were.

5) The only justifiable reason they give for delay is that the two sides have yet to agree on a protective order, which they claim is really important because of “the sensitivities and exposure associated with this prosecution.”

Additionally, the parties have yet to agree on a discovery protective agreement. Considering the sensitivities and exposure associated with this prosecution, a discovery protective agreement is a vital part of the overall discovery plan.

[snip]

On the afternoon of October 9, 2025, the defendant emailed back the government’s proposed protective agreement with significant proposed edits.

[snip]

Consistent with the Court’s direction at arraignment, the parties have also conferred regarding a discovery protection agreement. The government provided a past template used in the Eastern District of Virginia. The Defense made substantial edits, and the government agreed to those edits in large part. However, the parties still lack agreement as to whether the discovery can be provided and retained by the Defendant.

But they don’t provide the protective order (AKA “protection agreement”) with this filing. By their logic, they’re refusing to turn over discovery until they have one. By not turning it over, they’re ensuring that they cannot meet the currently set deadline of Monday.

6) Finally, they spelled North Carolina wrong.

Oct. 11

Emptywheel, Analysis: Emptywheel, Analysis: Prosecutors Sucking Lemons in Their Vindictive Prosecution of Jim Comey, (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 11, 2025. In this post, I noted a paragraph of a recent ABC story that had escaped much notice: one reason prosecutors didn’t think they would succeed in prosecuting Jim Comey (shown above in a file photo)was because there would be too much discovery.

Prosecutors further expressed concerns about the department’s ability to take the case to trial quickly due to problems identifying all the relevant materials that would need to be handed over to Comey’s lawyers, sources said.

I speculated that one reason the prosecutors borrowed from Raleigh — Tyler Lemons and Gabriel Diaz — claimed there would be extensive classified information was to stall for time.

Such efforts are already failing. At the arraignment, Judge Michael Nachmanoff, right, ordered the two sides to come up with a discovery order by Friday or submit their competing sides Monday.

Yesterday, Comey’s lawyers submitted this filing, explaining that they had immediately signed the standard discovery order, but had yet to receive a signed copy back.

As described, the two sides disagreed about one issue, what pretrial motion date would govern: the deadline for his Vindictive and Selective Prosecution claim (so five business days before October 20 — which is Monday), or the one ten days later for his other claims (October 23).

In the course of the parties’ meet and confer, the government sent the defense the standard discovery order attached and the defense signed it with no changes to the government’s proposal and returned it for government signatures on Thursday afternoon, October 9, 2025. To-date, however, the government has not returned a signed copy. While the parties agree to the terms of the standard discovery order, the parties disagree as to an interpretation of one term of the order—specifically, which of the two pretrial motions deadlines prompts the government’s Rule 16(a) production described in paragraph 1, requiring the government to produce certain discovery “no later than 5 business days before the deadline for pretrial motions.” See Exhibit 1 at 1 (emphasis added).

Mr. Comey asserts that the first set of pretrial motions due on October 20, 2025, which the Court ordered at the arraignment hearing, demands that discovery be produced on Monday, October 13, 2025. Naturally, at least some of this discovery will inform the bases for the vindictive and selective prosecution motion that is to be filed on October 20, 2025. As of the date of this filing, the defense has received one page of discovery. The government contends that the term “deadline for pretrial motions” refers to the deadline for the second tranche of pretrial motions, October 30, 2025.

To be able to fully articulate all bases for the first tranche of pretrial motions including the vindictive and selective nature of this case; to be able to effectively defend Mr. Comey; and because it is the plain language of the standard discovery order, Mr. Comey respectfully requests that the Court enter the additional proposed order making clear that “the deadline for pretrial motions” referenced in the standard discovery order is the first pretrial motions deadline of October 20, 2025. [my emphasis]

The part of this that is unmanageable is the requirement that prosecutors provide any statements the former FBI Director made about the matters at issue, which must be epic.

ORDERED that, pursuant to Fed. R. Crim. P. 16(a), no later than 5 business days before the deadline for pretrial motions, the government shall provide to the defense or make available for inspection and copying materials listed below that are in the possession of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

[snip]

any relevant written or recorded statements made by the defendant, or copies thereof, within the possession, custody, or control of the government, the existence ofwhich is known, or by the exercise of due diligence may become known

But the real reason prosecutors attempted this ploy is the requirement that prosecutors provide everything material to Comey’s defense (to say nothing of Brady obligations).

3. The government shall permit the defendant to inspect and copy or photograph books, papers, documents, data, photographs, tangible objects, buildings or places, or copies or portions thereof, which are within the possession, custody or control of the government, and which are material to the preparation of his defense

The rest of the ABC piece makes clear some of what that will include:

There’s Dan Richman’s testimony that, contrary to the claim in the charges, Comey had specifically ordered him not to serve as an anonymous source for the press.

Daniel Richman — a law professor who prosecutors allege Comey authorized to leak information to the press — told investigators that the former FBI director instructed him not to engage with the media on at least two occasions and unequivocally said Comey never authorized him to provide information to a reporter anonymously ahead of the 2016 election, the sources said.

[snip]

When prosecutors met with Richman in September, he told them that he never served as an anonymous source for Comey or acted at Comey’s direction while he was FBI director, sources familiar with his interview told ABC News. In at least two cases when Richman asked if he should speak with the press, Comey advised him not to do so, sources said.

As an earlier ABC story reported, it will also include John Durham’s testimony that, in four years of trying, he never found evidence that Jim Comey lied.

John Durham (right), the former special counsel who spent nearly four years examining the origins of the FBI investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, told federal prosecutors investigating James Comey that he was unable to uncover evidence that would support false statements or obstruction charges against the former FBI director, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

And it’ll also include the testimony of other prosecutors who spent years investigating Comey that they also did not find any evidence he committed a crime.

The prosecutors also met with a team of lawyers at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., who had investigated Comey for years — including calling him to testify before a grand jury in 2021 — but were unable to identify any chargeable offenses committed by Comey, sources familiar with the meeting said.

It might even include the declination recommendation submitted to Erik Siebert just days before Trump started demanding prosecutions anyway.

Whether or not Comey’s Vindictive and Selective Prosecution succeeds (as Lawfare has laid out, the legal standard for those is a bit inapt for his case), this testimony would nevertheless provide an opportunity to lay out proof of something that right wingers and NYT reporters continue to deny: Donald Trump did investigate precisely the same people he demands be prosecuted now.

For years.

But some very determined prosecutors concluded that there was no probable cause to charge him.

Without waiting to hear from prosecutors, Nachmanoff filed the discovery order — signed by just Comey’s attorneys — to the docket, and issued an order stating that the earlier deadline applies.

The first pretrial motions deadline in this matter is October 20, 2025. This is the pretrial motions deadline to which the discovery order refers and the date that prompts the government’s Rule 16(a) discovery production.

By Monday, Lemons and Diaz going to have to decide how badly they want to risk their own law license.

• They could move to dismiss the prosecution, the ethical thing to do, but one that will get them fired. And even then, now there’s a matter before Nachmanoff that could force the disclosure of all that anyway.
• They could admit that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer, right, was not lawfully appointed (the one piece of discovery they did provide is likely her appointment order, which will be enough to prove that she was not lawfully appointed), and therefore the indictment is invalid.
• They could turn over evidence to Jim Comey that shows prosecutors knew there was no probable cause to charge him but did anyway.
• Or they could stall, putting their own careers at risk in a different way.

This dilemma makes it clear why Comey was all smiles last week. It makes it clear why Pat Fitzgerald, right, and not Lemons and Diaz, appeared to be the one directing a prosecution Wednesday.

It even makes his two-phase approach clear. Comey’s case is inapt to existing Vindictive and Selective Prosecution precedents. But what Fitzgerald has done is force an immediate disclosure of this stuff, which he can then use to make arguments that effectively put Lindsey Halligan’s — and through her, Trump’s — behavior on trial, what Fitz described as “a grand jury abuse motion, and outrageous government conduct motion.”

Unless prosecutors find a way to make this problem go away, in nine days, we’ll get details (in the Vindictive and Selective Prosecution motion) of how badly Trump has tried to prosecute Jim Comey, and how those efforts failed, until the moment he unlawfully installed his own defense attorney as US Attorney at EDVA.

One other thing about how this will work.

Remember that Maurene Comey is suing, arguing that she was fired solely because of her dad. I would be unsurprised if she submitted a amended complaint incorporating the vindictive prosecution motion.Reply

One MORE thing: By the time of Tish James’ arraignment, Comey’s selective prosecution motion will be submitted. 

Oct. 10 

 

U.S. Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Lawfare, The Justice Department’s Dangerously Weak Case Against Letitia James, Molly Roberts, right, Oct. 10, 2025. Lindsey Halligan didn't have a strong case against Letitia James. She indicted her anyway.

Earlier this week, the Justice Department seemed poised to pursue an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James on pathetically weak charges. Yet the charges that actually ended up in the indictment a jury returned on Thursday may somehow be even weaker.

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan—President Trump’s handpicked replacement for Erik S. Siebert after he concluded there wasn’t sufficient evidence to charge either James or former FBI Director James Comey—presented evidence to grand jurors herself in the case.

That’s unusual, and not only because Halligan is an insurance lawyer with no prosecutorial experience; career staff would typically do the job of presenting, but in this case as in Comey’s, they balked. In fact, Halligan reportedly didn’t even inform Attorney General Pam Bondi or the main Justice Department the indictment was coming.

No wonder.

The criminal referral that Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte sent to the Justice Department in the spring alleged that James might have violated the wire fraud statute (18 U.S.C. § 1343), the mail fraud statute (8 U.S.C. § 1341), the bank fraud law (18 U.S.C. § 1344), and a law against false statements to a financial institution (18 U.S.C. § 1014) when she applied for mortgages in Virginia and New York.

A property James purchased in 2023 in Norfolk, Va., was expected to be at the center of any case to come out of the Eastern District—on the grounds that she misrepresented the home as her primary residence to secure a better rate when applying for a loan, when really she lived, as required by law given her position as attorney general, in New York. This argument was terribly strained. In reality, the home was a primary residence: for James’s niece, whom the attorney general was helping out by co-signing on the mortgage.

Perhaps recognizing the questionable quality of this case, prosecutors have settled on another altogether. The indictment they’ve secured involves a Norfolk property, yes, but one purchased in 2020 rather than 2023. The Justice Department alleges that James described this property as a “second home” rather than the investment property it really was—and that by doing so, she managed to avoid an 0.815 percent higher rate and emerge with “ill-gotten gains” of $18,933 over the life of the loan.

Meet the New Case (Worse than the Old Case?)

Prosecutors are still charging James with bank fraud and false statements to a financial institution, both of which have a statute of limitations of 10 years. To win a conviction, they’ll have to prove that James knowingly made a false statement that was intended to deceive as well as either intended, or tending, to influence the decision of a bank.

The indictment asserts that James financed her purchase of a three-bedroom, one-bathroom property in Norfolk with a loan involving a “Second Home Rider”—a document attached to second-home mortgages that restricts the borrower’s ability to rent the property out. “Despite these representations,” prosecutors say, the property “was not occupied or used by James as a secondary residence and was instead used as a rental investment property.” They note that she filled out Schedule E tax forms indicating she received rental income from the property, and reported zero “personal use” days.

Ahead of the indictment, ABC reported that prosecutors were considering a case exactly like this—but that senior Justice Department leadership wasn’t confident they’d be able to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt. The Fannie Mae guidelines on the issue, they worried, were too squishy. And squishy they are: They yield, at least as applied to the Letitia James case, under the gentlest of scrutiny.

Sam Antar, the convicted felon and former certified public accountant who carried out a massive securities scam in the 1980s and has now transformed himself into a muckracking “fraud expert,” surfaced many of the documents now at the center of the James investigation. The trove of information appears to include the mortgage papers at issue in the indictment, including the James-signed second-home rider, whose language matches the Fannie Mae standard.

The rider bars James from entering into “a timesharing or any other shared ownership arrangement or agreement that requires her either to rent the property or give any other person any control over the occupancy or use of the property”—just as the indictment explains it does. But prosecutors don’t even bother to allege she ever entered into such an arrangement. All they allege is that she rented out the property, and that she didn’t personally use it.

That behavior, the rider doesn’t prohibit. On the contrary, it explicitly allows short-term renting during the first year according to certain conditions. One of those conditions does concern occupancy: The home must be “available primarily as a residence for [her] personal use”—but only available. James need not actually have used it. After the first year, renting is even fairer game. Regulators deliberately rewrote the standard rider in 2019 to make renting easier for second-home owners.

Exactly how James used, or didn’t use, the property remains to be seen. The evidence so far appears almost laughably flimsy: The Schedule E forms the indictment references aren’t publicly available, but James provided Antar’s trawled up financial disclosures to the state of New York, and she only notes having received rental income from the Norfolk property in one year, 2020. The amount? $1,000 to $5,000. The indictment’s otherwise odd wording around the “thousand(s) of dollars in rents received” that James recorded on her taxes suggests the amount indicated therein is similar or the same—and consistent with a short-term rental.

If At First You Don’t Succeed

Even proving that James made a false statement to a bank seems like a tall task, given it’s unclear she violated the guidelines for second homes. Proving that she intended to deceive the bank—that she had a firm belief those squishy rules forbade her behavior, and so concealed her intentions from her lender—is a more difficult endeavor still.

That doesn’t matter to President Trump’s indefatigable team of loyal lawyers. The case against James for which the Justice Department received a criminal referral didn’t appear strong enough, so Weaponization Working Group Director and Special Attorney for Mortgage Fraud Ed Martin seems to have gone searching for a stronger one. This one ended up too weak for career prosecutors to feel comfortable with it either, so Lindsey Halligan went ahead and took it to a grand jury on her own.

If she fails in court, perhaps there’s a tiny box on an inconsequential form somewhere else that Letitia James forgot to tick. Or maybe now it’s Adam Schiff’s turn instead. Halligan said in her statement accompanying the indictment that the charges represent “tremendous breaches of the public’s trust.” That’s true—just not in the way she meant it.

Molly Roberts, right, is a senior editor at Lawfare. She was previously a member of the editorial board at The Washington Post, where she covered technology, legal affairs and more, as well as wrote columns about everything from cryptocurrency grift and graft to panda diplomacy at the National Zoo.

Legal AF via YouTube, Trump DOJ SHOCKED by SURPRISE STAR WITNESS in Comey CASE, Shanlon Wu, Oct. 10, 2025. Former federal prosecutor Shan Wu analyzes the impact of the surprise witness!

New star witness in the James Comey case – it’s not who you think it is – it’s not an FBI informant or some close friend of Comey who will tell all about what he did.

It’s someone we all thought had gone quietly into the night – but they are uniquely situated and a veteran of years of DOJ service.  

 

Emptywheel, Analysis: The Nativists Are Getting Restless: How the Rhythm of the Comey Prosecution May Backfire, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 10, 2025. Donald Trump indicted Jim Comey (and Tish James, and probably John Bolton next) not just because he is wracked by a compulsion to humiliate the people who have the temerity to suggest the justice system should apply to him, too.

His fascist project also requires him to completely replace rule of law with corruption, as part of a tool to enforce loyalty.

But as he betrayed in the Truth Social post to Pam Bondi that he accidentally posted publicly, he also did so because his rubes are growing impatient.

I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done.

Donald Trump has sold his rubes on a promise of “justice:” that those he has demonized will be branded criminals not just in Trump’s propaganda, but by the legal system as well. The nativists were getting restless that he had yet to deliver and so Trump was under pressure and that’s part of why he pressured Bondi in turn.

It’s not just Trump’s pathologies that demanded these indictments; it’s also the impatience of a very dangerous mob.

With the impatience of Trump’s mob in mind, I want to look at what the Comey arraignment suggests the rhythm of this particular prosecution will go.

EDVA’s rocket docket

EDVA (DOJ's Eastern District of Virginia) has what’s called a “rocket docket,” an expectation that cases go to trial as quickly as possible and that the trial be as short as possible. On its face, a rocket docket could disrupt Trump’s need to feed his rubes, because it would hasten the moment when the whole thing is exposed as a fraud.

But it also poses a problem because the professionals who will take over this prosecution from Lindsey Halligan — Raleigh AUSAs Tyler Lemons (who took the lead at the arraignment) and Gabriel Diaz — only filed their notices of appearance on October 7, the day before arraignment, and when Patrick Fitzgerald reached out to them, they were completely unprepared to describe even the most basic aspects of the charges against Comey.

Unsurprisingly, the first thing Judge Michael Nachmanoff asked — after Fitzgerald entered a plea of not guilty for Comey — was to ask what date speedy trial would require a trial, which both Fitzgerald and Nachmanoff agreed would work out to be December 17.

When Nachmanoff, right, asked if the case could go to trial by then, Fitzgerald skipped a step, immediately describing that he had sent a letter to prosecutors laying out his theory of defense and a two-phased set of motions he planned to file. He described the first — a Selective and Vindictive prosecution challenge and a challenge to Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s appointment — to be submitted on October 20.

As Fitzgerald described, “our view is that this prosecution was brought at the direction of President Trump to silence a constant critic of him and, “we think [Halligan’s appointment] is an unlawful appointment.”

He was less sure about what he would file ten days later, on October 30, but suggested a Bronston literal truth defense motion (the basis for which Anthony Trenga threw out one charge against Igor Danchenko in this same district), a grand jury abuse motion, and an outrageous government conduct motion.

Selling a Lemons CIPA dodge

Lemons used Fitzgerald’s explanation that he would like to exclude 31 days of time from Speedy Trial to insinuate Fitzgerald had suggested Comey needed time to prepare for trial, only to then confess he was not prepared to prosecute the case. “Part of it is obviously honoring the defense’s request for the later trial date and understanding and wanting them to be — have the time adequate to prepare for trial, but also in — it’s no discredit to Mr. Fitzgerald. He’s not — and we’re just getting our hands around the discovery as well.” But he also pointed to “a large amount of discovery which also includes classified information” for the request for more time.

Let me interrupt and note that the most recent ABC piece disclosing concerns the EDVA prosecutors had about the case included the amount of information the government would have to share with Comey.

Prosecutors further expressed concerns about the department’s ability to take the case to trial quickly due to problems identifying all the relevant materials that would need to be handed over to Comey’s lawyers, sources said.

As described, this is not about classified information (though I don’t doubt there’s a fair amount of materials on the SVR files believed to be at the heart of Dan Richman’s involvement). So it seems likely that Lemons is leaning on classified information as a way to stall.

Nevertheless, my sense is this is when things began to get a bit tense in the hearing, not least because it made it important for Fitzgerald to put on the record how unprepared the prosecution team was, but also because it raised the hackles of an EDVA judge about an interloper coming in and refusing to comply with rocket docket considerations.

Fitzgerald used it as an invitation to repeat that prosecutors had not yet told him who the people described in the indictment were (a complaint he made in different form at least three times).

But — as a guy who has presided over some of the most difficult CIPA processes in history — he also scolded prosecutors for putting the cart before the horse, charging before making sure spooks would be willing to declassify intelligence to make a criminal case (not coincidentally, something John Durham did too).

We would have thought in the normal course when the government brings a case, they address the classified information issues ahead of time, coordinate within the national security section, and have a plan. And, frankly, we feel like in this case, the cart may have been put before the horse, and my client would not like to wait around unnecessarily while they go through things we think that should have been done before.

For his part, Nachmanoff used the CIPA excuse as an opportunity to order prosecutors to get Fitzgerald clearance as quickly as possible and to conduct the fastest CIPA process in history. “Either it’s not relevant to the case or it can be declassified or we will go through the fastest CIPA process you have ever seen in your lives.”

Donald Trump’s clearance tantrums

There are two surprises that may arise out of this focus on CIPA, even ignoring Nachmanoff’s impatience with it.

Nachmanoff only described getting Fitzgerald clearance (he noted that Jessica Carmichael, the only attorney of the five present who was currently practicing in EDVA, “has had a number of national security cases in this district in the last few months”). He did not mention Comey getting clearance.

That said, it is customary in CIPA cases to give a defendant clearance if he had clearance to access the materials at issue in a case during the period of the alleged crime — that’s the standard adopted, for example, by Aileen Cannon in the stolen documents case.

If Comey wanted access to this material — and there’s good reason to argue he should — then it might create a conflict between prosecutors (including Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer) and Trump, because one of the areas where a purportedly unreviewable Presidential authority has come under challenge is in legal cases, where the government has tried to moot a legal case by denying someone clearance.

That is, this trial might force Trump to agree to give Comey clearance, something he has stripped from all his adversaries.

But Comey might have reason not to pursue it: because of the even more abusive case Jack Eckenrode is attempting to build in WDVA.

Jack Eckenrode, WDVA, and John Durham’s discovery woes

Last week, one of the FBI agents purged by Kash Patel, Michael Feinberg, described that one of two FBI agents on this case was, “John Durham’s factotum and enforcer,” which via this link he confirmed to mean Jack Eckenrode.

The significance of Eckenrode’s role in this case has received far too little attention. As late as Scooter Libby’s indictment, Eckenrode was a key investigator on Fitzgerald’s CIA Leak case team. But then, as multiple people got leaked information about Karl Rove being imminently indicted, he wasn’t anymore. He and Fitzgerald (and Comey, as the link above notes) go way back, but there’s also a decent chance that Fitzgerald has reasons to know that Eckenrode leaked details of that earlier investigation to pressure him to expand the charges.

And, as Feinberg noted, Eckenrode was Durham’s right hand man, which makes Durham’s testimony (also reported by ABC) pretty awkward.

John Durham, left, the former special counsel who spent nearly four years examining the origins of the FBI investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, told federal prosecutors investigating James Comey that he was unable to uncover evidence that would support false statements or obstruction charges against the former FBI director, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Federal prosecutors in Virginia met remotely with Durham in August to understand the findings of his investigation, according to sources familiar with the meeting, and his conclusions raise the prospect that Durham — who was once elevated by Trump and other Republicans believing he would prosecute high-level officials involved with the investigation of the president’s 2016 campaign — could now become a key figure aiding Comey’s defense.

But Eckenrode is also, per the NYT, the lead investigator in an investigation in WDVA premised on what seems to be a theory that FBI agents hid documents in a burn bag to protect people like Comey.

And that suggests a certain logic to the charges as originally packaged (which Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer fucked up and caused to be released). Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer, coached by Eckenrode, first tried to get the grand jury to approve three charges:

• One false statement charge claiming Comey lied when he couldn’t remember what Durham and Eckenrode, with the collusion of Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe, falsely packaged up into a “Clinton Plan” to frame Donald Trump (this is the one the grand jury rejected)

• Another false statement charge claiming Comey lied when he answered (he didn’t really) that he had not authorized anyone to speak to the press anonymously for him, which at some point meant Dan Richman sharing information about SVR documents suggesting that Loretta Lynch was helping Hillary dodge the email investigation

• An obstruction charge arising out of those lies (and now, the single charged lie)

That is, the original theory of the case (and unless the new prosecutors pull a wild headfake to try to salvage the case, still the theory) was directly relevant to the WDVA case. The idea being, you “prove” in EDVA that Jim Comey was lying in 2020 about his knowledge of multiple SVR documents, which you then use to build a case in WDVA that the FBI was conspiring to protect an effort in 2016 to focus on Trump to the exclusion of Hillary.

This is a direct replay of the strategy that Durham (who debunked the current charges) adopted (working with Eckenrode) in 2021, when he attempted to hang conspiracies around two thin false statement cases against Michael Sussmann, right, and Igor Danchenko. You use the false statement to prove a motive for the conspiracy.

You also use one case — as Durham did with privilege challenges in the Sussmann case to obtain records that might have been pertinent to the Igor Danchenko case if they had said what his fervant fever dreams imagined they might — to attempt to obtain evidence for the larger case.

What’s worth knowing, though, is how classification stymied Durham’s case but also — thus far — protected his collusion with Russian spies.

First, in 2020 (literally leading up to the Jim Comey testimony for which he has been charged), Ratcliffe and Kash “declassified” a bunch of documents in a misleading way to substantiate their “Clinton Plan” fabrication, pretty much reversing the meaning of the documents. That then formed the backbone of the Durham investigation.

But Durham only shared still-classified SVR documents with a few subjects of the investigation, like Julianne Smith. He showed targets, like Peter Strzok, the misleadingly classified documents (indeed, that’s what the question to Comey they wanted to charge would have been based on). There was a CIPA process with Sussmann, but I’m convinced they didn’t give him adequate substitutions, because otherwise he would have argued that they were framing him with fabricated documents.

The important detail is that Durham tried to coerce testimony from targets, undoubtedly including Comey, that would have required granting them clearance for such testimony. Witnesses could and some did avoid testifying by refusing to accept clearance — the same thing that the US Attorney in Philadelphia is using with a credulous Marc Caputo to excuse his inability to charge John Brennan.

Of course, to the extent that prosecutors who know none of this background have been dragged into this at the last minute, they may be forced to provide Fitzgerald, at least, with the proof that Eckenrode is still chasing decade old Russian disinformation. They’re just getting their hands around the discovery as well, Lemons explained.

They may in fact hand Fitzgerald evidence that Eckenrode committed the crime he wants to frame Jim Comey of doing.

Lindsey Halligan won’t say who she represents

There were two other details of from the arraignment that didn’t get enough attention, in my opinion.

First, here’s how the introductions went down. Lemons, the AUSA taking the lead, spoke first, greeting Judge Nachmanoff and describing his client in the standard manner. “Good morning, Your Honor. Tyler Lemons for the United States government.”

Lindsey, left, the Insurance Lawyer, went next. Not only did she not greet the judge, but … she didn’t tell us who she represents. “Lindsey Halligan,” was all she said.

After Gabriel Diaz introduced himself in the normal fashion (greeting, then describing that he represents the US), Fitzgerald gave the answer that made all the press reports (probably by design): “Good morning, Your Honor. Pat Fitzgerald, and it’s the honor of my life to represent Mr. Comey in this matter.”

Carmichael, the only one currently practicing in EDVA, also gave the standard answer. “Good morning, Your Honor. Jessica Carmichael for Mr. Comey.”

Given that the only times Lindsey the Insurance lawyer has represented anyone in federal court before, she introduced herself as representing Donald Trump, perhaps it was just safer for Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer to say as little as possible.

More interesting, however, is that Nachmanoff was not playing dumb to the problems with Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s presence. After Fitzgerald described his plan to challenge Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s appointment, Nachmanoff described — having already checked — what the procedure would be. “[A]ny motion to disqualify Ms. Halligan will be heard by an out-of-district judge,” Nachmanoff explained. “That is the process that has been followed in New Jersey and Nevada, and the Court will follow that process here, which means that a request will be made to Chief Judge Diaz of the Fourth Circuit to appoint an out-of-circuit judge only to address that issue.”

He came prepared for this issue.

As Nachmanoff moved onto a discovery order, Fitzgerald pointed to a piece of discovery he wants right away. “[W]e would like to see the appointment papers forthwith. We don’t want to be shooting at the wrong target” on the disqualification motion. Fitzgerald, who has had all manner of DOJ appointments in his day (once, on Jim Comey’s orders) noted “that most appointment papers for United States attorneys are a page or two, we would ask if we could have that forthwith” so that they could start drafting their motion.

In multiple cases when the Trump Administration tries something funny (as with the Illinois invasion, in which DOD fucked up the authorizing paperwork at least three times), they often don’t have their paperwork in order.

Which is to say, even before the reports out today that Lindsey didn’t consult with ODAG on public integrity concerns about indicting Tish James, DOJ may not have their ducks in a row.

Even as it is, Trump’s indictments of Comey and James have only worked within the narrow bubble of his frothers. In the wider world, they have focused increasing attention on his corruption. But by putting two prosecutors with absolutely no understanding of this background, to say nothing of the real ethical hazards involved in this case, they made it much easier for Fitzgerald to flip the table, to appear as if he is the one doing the prosecution, not them.

Oct. 9

Jim Acosta Show, Prosecutors Just Realized Something Terrifying About Comey's Case, Oct. 9, 2025. Ex-DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer says the government's prosecution of former FBI director James Comey is already in serious trouble. The biggest threat? It has nothing to do with the evidence against Comey—and everything to do with a decision Trump made before charges were even filed. 

 

Lawfare, Three Thoughts on the Comey Arraignment, Benjamin Wittes, right,  Oct. 9-10, 2025. I’ve never seen an arraignment hearing quite like this one.

Today, I read the transcript of James Comey’s arraignment—even as the world moved on to the next abuse.

I was not present for yesterday’s opening hearing in the Comey case, having been out of town. And while I was familiar with the press coverage of the arraignment, including the excellent coverage by Lawfare’s Anna Bower and Roger Parloff, I was keen to read the raw transcript itself to see what I could glean from the specific words spoken in court about the direction of the case.

Today I got even further behind in my efforts to keep up with the Justice Department’s ongoing abuse of the criminal process and targeting of its political foes.

Barely had I finished reading the transcript than this afternoon brought an indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James—a subject to which I will no doubt return after I have read the relevant documents.

In the meantime, I have three observations about yesterday’s transcript, before The Situation shifts from Comey to James—and thence to whomever the next indictee might prove to be.

The first is that there is a notable gap between prosecution and defense lawyers who showed up to yesterday’s hearing in what we might call pride of service. On the prosecution side, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia could not find a single lawyer who had worked for the office prior to late September to stand up in court and say, “My name is X and I represent the United States.”

Not one.

The acting U.S. attorney, of course, had been fired because he wouldn’t bring this case. And no career official from the office was at the prosecution table either. Instead, there were two assistant United States attorneys from North Carolina, whose familiarity with the case was so limited that they stressed they were only just starting to get their hands around it and its discovery.

On the other side, by contrast, Comey’s lead defense counsel introduced himself as follows: “Your Honor. Pat Fitzgerald, and it's the honor of my life to represent Mr. Comey in this matter.”

This is a bit of an inversion of the normal understanding of the roles of criminal lawyers. Federal prosecutors typically feel a certain honor and pride in representing the United States in court—believing that their cases represent attempts to do justice. Defense counsel, by contrast, generally think of themselves as representing a check on the justice system’s coercive power in general. But they often don’t take particular pride in their specific individual representations as embodying justice—much less that representing a particular accused miscreant is the honor of their lives. There are exceptions, of course, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a case in which the prosecution was so evidently ashamed of its case and the defense so visibly proud to represent someone accused of a crime.

Fitzgerald is, of course, a smart lawyer, and he was—I assume—making this point intentionally. But the point is also undoubtedly sincere. And it works rhetorically because it is so intuitively right. Fitzgerald is a famed federal prosecutor—one who has prosecuted mobsters, politicians, and White House officials on behalf of the United States—saying that the singular honor of his entire career is representing a defendant against prosecution by the United States, even as the government is having trouble finding lawyers to show up in court on its behalf.

The second point is a related one, and it concerns preparation. There is something embarrassing about the government indicting a case and then showing up in court completely unprepared to litigate it. Yet in a brief hearing, the government did not merely put forward new lawyers from a different state who had clearly been assigned to the matter only a day or two earlier, these lawyers declared they had not yet discerned the scope of their discovery obligations, anticipated that there might be issues with respect to classified material but did not yet know the full scope of those issues, and asked for time to sort things out that are normally sorted out before a case is ever brought.

“We’re just getting our hands around the discovery as well,” prosecutor Tyler Lemons said, as though the prosecution hadn’t had five years to figure out what documents it might need to produce if it brought this case.

The defense too, acknowledged that it was also unprepared—but for a very different reason.

Fitzgerald stated he still lacked the most basic information about what the indictment alleges Comey is supposed to have done. The people about whom Comey is alleged to have lied to Congress are still unnamed, he noted. “We haven't received a single piece of paper of discovery to date. We still haven’t been told who PERSON 3 and PERSON 1 are. We don’t know the nature of the charges . . . “

Despite his professed unpreparedness, Fitzgerald was able to sketch out a speedy briefing schedule, in which the defense will file its motions to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution and challenging the legality of the appointment of Lindsey Halligan in less than two weeks and then, while the government is responding to those, prepare a second tranche of motions to file in November: “We're a little less certain of precisely what motions [these] would be, but there might be a Bronston literal truth defense motion. There may be a grand jury abuse motion, outrageous government conduct motion, but those motions would be addressed to the indictment,” he said.

It is fairly normal to see cases in which at arraignment the defense has not gotten its act together yet while the prosecution has its ducks neatly lined up. Indictments, after all, sometimes take defendants by surprise. Defendants don’t always have their legal teams set up yet.

The opposite situation—-one in which the prosecution can’t even give a coherent account of its discovery process or a sense of the role classified material might play in the case, while the defense can lay out a roadmap to trial—I have never seen before.

My third observation is that the reason for both of the first two points is the same and unsubtle: Because the government is behaving shamefully and proceeding with a rushed criminal case based on compound untruths, it neither has put itself in a position to behave responsibly—by having discovery ready and the like—nor does it have access to attorneys of the sort who know the case they have brought when it comes time to move it forward in court.

But expecting that sort of thing is apparently passé. Today the Eastern District of Virginia is already on to Letitia James for a crime she also didn’t commit. 

 

Jim Acosta Show, Prosecutors Just Realized Something Terrifying About Comey's Case, Oct. 9, 2025. Ex-DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer says the government's prosecution of former FBI director James Comey is already in serious trouble. The biggest threat? It has nothing to do with the evidence against Comey—and everything to do with a decision Trump made before charges were even filed.

Lawfare, Three Thoughts on the Comey Arraignment, Benjamin Wittes, right,  Oct. 9-10, 2025. I’ve never seen an arraignment hearing quite like this one.

Today, I read the transcript of James Comey’s arraignment—even as the world moved on to the next abuse.

I was not present for yesterday’s opening hearing in the Comey case, having been out of town. And while I was familiar with the press coverage of the arraignment, including the excellent coverage by Lawfare’s Anna Bower and Roger Parloff, I was keen to read the raw transcript itself to see what I could glean from the specific words spoken in court about the direction of the case.

Today I got even further behind in my efforts to keep up with the Justice Department’s ongoing abuse of the criminal process and targeting of its political foes.

Barely had I finished reading the transcript than this afternoon brought an indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James—a subject to which I will no doubt return after I have read the relevant documents.

In the meantime, I have three observations about yesterday’s transcript, before The Situation shifts from Comey to James—and thence to whomever the next indictee might prove to be.

The first is that there is a notable gap between prosecution and defense lawyers who showed up to yesterday’s hearing in what we might call pride of service. On the prosecution side, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia could not find a single lawyer who had worked for the office prior to late September to stand up in court and say, “My name is X and I represent the United States.”

Not one.

The acting U.S. attorney, of course, had been fired because he wouldn’t bring this case. And no career official from the office was at the prosecution table either. Instead, there were two assistant United States attorneys from North Carolina, whose familiarity with the case was so limited that they stressed they were only just starting to get their hands around it and its discovery.

On the other side, by contrast, Comey’s lead defense counsel introduced himself as follows: “Your Honor. Pat Fitzgerald, and it's the honor of my life to represent Mr. Comey in this matter.”

This is a bit of an inversion of the normal understanding of the roles of criminal lawyers. Federal prosecutors typically feel a certain honor and pride in representing the United States in court—believing that their cases represent attempts to do justice. Defense counsel, by contrast, generally think of themselves as representing a check on the justice system’s coercive power in general. But they often don’t take particular pride in their specific individual representations as embodying justice—much less that representing a particular accused miscreant is the honor of their lives. There are exceptions, of course, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a case in which the prosecution was so evidently ashamed of its case and the defense so visibly proud to represent someone accused of a crime.

Fitzgerald is, of course, a smart lawyer, and he was—I assume—making this point intentionally. But the point is also undoubtedly sincere. And it works rhetorically because it is so intuitively right. Fitzgerald is a famed federal prosecutor—one who has prosecuted mobsters, politicians, and White House officials on behalf of the United States—saying that the singular honor of his entire career is representing a defendant against prosecution by the United States, even as the government is having trouble finding lawyers to show up in court on its behalf.

The second point is a related one, and it concerns preparation. There is something embarrassing about the government indicting a case and then showing up in court completely unprepared to litigate it. Yet in a brief hearing, the government did not merely put forward new lawyers from a different state who had clearly been assigned to the matter only a day or two earlier, these lawyers declared they had not yet discerned the scope of their discovery obligations, anticipated that there might be issues with respect to classified material but did not yet know the full scope of those issues, and asked for time to sort things out that are normally sorted out before a case is ever brought.

“We’re just getting our hands around the discovery as well,” prosecutor Tyler Lemons said, as though the prosecution hadn’t had five years to figure out what documents it might need to produce if it brought this case.

The defense too, acknowledged that it was also unprepared—but for a very different reason.

Fitzgerald stated he still lacked the most basic information about what the indictment alleges Comey is supposed to have done. The people about whom Comey is alleged to have lied to Congress are still unnamed, he noted. “We haven't received a single piece of paper of discovery to date. We still haven’t been told who PERSON 3 and PERSON 1 are. We don’t know the nature of the charges . . . “

Despite his professed unpreparedness, Fitzgerald was able to sketch out a speedy briefing schedule, in which the defense will file its motions to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution and challenging the legality of the appointment of Lindsey Halligan in less than two weeks and then, while the government is responding to those, prepare a second tranche of motions to file in November: “We're a little less certain of precisely what motions [these] would be, but there might be a Bronston literal truth defense motion. There may be a grand jury abuse motion, outrageous government conduct motion, but those motions would be addressed to the indictment,” he said.

It is fairly normal to see cases in which at arraignment the defense has not gotten its act together yet while the prosecution has its ducks neatly lined up. Indictments, after all, sometimes take defendants by surprise. Defendants don’t always have their legal teams set up yet.

The opposite situation—-one in which the prosecution can’t even give a coherent account of its discovery process or a sense of the role classified material might play in the case, while the defense can lay out a roadmap to trial—I have never seen before.

My third observation is that the reason for both of the first two points is the same and unsubtle: Because the government is behaving shamefully and proceeding with a rushed criminal case based on compound untruths, it neither has put itself in a position to behave responsibly—by having discovery ready and the like—nor does it have access to attorneys of the sort who know the case they have brought when it comes time to move it forward in court.

But expecting that sort of thing is apparently passé. Today the Eastern District of Virginia is already on to Letitia James for a crime she also didn’t commit.

Oct. 8

New York Times, Updates: Comey Will Seek to Dismiss Case as Vindictive Prosecution, Glenn Thrush, Oct. 8, 2025. The former F.B.I. director pleaded not guilty during a hearing in federal court. He requested a jury trial, which was set for Jan. 5, and clarity on the two charges against him.

James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director reviled by President Trump and targeted as part of his retribution campaign, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Wednesday morning in federal court in Alexandria, Va.

The judge overseeing the hearing set a trial date for Jan. 5. But Mr. Comey’s lead lawyer, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said he intended to file motions to dismiss the case before then, including one accusing the government of vindictive and selective prosecution based on Mr. Trump’s public demand that Comey be prosecuted.

Mr. Fitzgerald, a former federal prosecutor, also said the Justice Department’s rush to charge Mr. Comey had left his defense team unclear about the specifics of the counts he is facing. Mr. Comey was indicted last month in a two-page filing that offered almost no details on the accusations.

“We still have not been told who Person 3 and Person 1 are,” Mr. Fitzgerald said, referring to the indictment. He later added: “We still haven’t been told precisely what is in count 1 or count 2.”

Mr. Comey faces one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020. He faces up to five years in prison if convicted, though many current and former prosecutors believe the case will be difficult to prove.

Here’s what else to know:

• Routine proceeding: Mr. Comey’s plea and request for a jury trial were entered in a brief appearance before Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff. Judge Nachmanoff said he was “a little skeptical” about prosecutors’ insinuations that the case was complex enough to require extra time. “This does not appear to me to be an overly complicated case,” he said.
• Bitter history: The case against Mr. Comey, who ordered the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, is the most significant legal action taken against people Mr. Trump has publicly targeted. His indictment came shortly after the president all but commanded his attorney general to take legal action against Mr. Comey; Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat; and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
• Rocky path: The case against Mr. Comey proceeded over the opposition of prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia. The prosecutor who ultimately handled it was Lindsey Halligan, a White House lawyer hastily installed by Mr. Trump as U.S. attorney after her predecessor found insufficient evidence to support an indictment.
• The defense: Mr. Comey’s defense is being led by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was himself once a prominent federal law enforcement official. As a federal prosecutor in New York and then Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald played major roles in several important terrorism cases and successfully prosecuted two former governors of Illinois, George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich, in corruption cases.
• President’s impact: Vindictive prosecution motions are notoriously difficult to win, but Mr. Trump’s voluble vitriol and his repeated attacks on his former F.B.I. director could provide Mr. Comey’s defense with an avenue to protect him.

The district judge presiding in the case, Michael Nachmanoff, projected an air of polite impatience with the prosecution in Comey’s arraignment hearing, and said he was “skeptical” of the government’s claim that there would be significant classified evidence introduced. He made it clear he did not want to drag the proceedings along.

Charlie Savage, Legal policy reporter: There has been discussion among legal commentators about whether the Trump’s administration’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan as U.S. attorney was invalid, in which case the indictment she obtained could be thrown out.

The issue is that when there is a vacancy in the position, the attorney general is able install someone as an “interim” U.S. attorney for 120 days, but after that expires, the law says a federal court can decide who next serves as interim.

The U.S. attorney who was removed for refusing to bring a case against Comey based on the available evidence, Erik Siebert, had already served a 120-day term as an attorney general appointment. The question is whether the Trump administration had the authority to make a second interim appointment. 

Talking  Points Memo, Key Witness Undercuts Trump DOJ’s Witch Hunt Against Jim Comey, David Kurtz, Oct. 8, 2025.

Prior reporting had already suggested that a key witness in the bogus prosecution of former FBI Director Jim Comey was not helpful to prosecutors, but ABC News has a new story out this morning that expands on the obstacle the witness presents to interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s case.

The witness is longtime Comey friend Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University.

ABC News has consistently had good sources seemingly from within the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Its sources for the latest story are familiar with the contents of the internal memo in which career prosecutors laid out the reasons for not seeking an indictment of Comey. That decision led Trump to force out then-acting U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert (Trump’s own nominee for the permanent post) and replace him with Halligan, who promptly indicted the case personally.

As I read the ABC News story, the quoted phrases “problematic” and “likely insurmountable problems” are directly from the memo declining to prosecute:

Federal prosecutors investigating former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly making false statements to Congress determined that a central witness in their probe would prove “problematic” and likely prevent them from establishing their case to a jury, sources familiar with their findings told ABC News. …

According to prosecutors who investigated the circumstances surrounding Comey’s 2020 testimony for two months, using Richman’s testimony to prove that Comey knowingly provided false statements to Congress would result in “likely insurmountable problems” for the prosecution.

Investigators detailed those conclusions in a lengthy memo last month recommending that the office not move forward in charging Comey, according to sources familiar with the memo’s contents.

To put it bluntly, a key witness is “hostile,” in the words of Halligan’s deputy, to the prosecution’s case. Some cases can survive that kind of weakness, but prosecutors in Virginia and earlier in DC, have failed to find additional evidence that Comey lied to Congress as alleged. So there’s precious little evidence for prosecutors to use to overcome the weakness presented by Richman:

Investigators who reviewed material from Comey’s emails, including his correspondence with Richman, could not identify an instance when Comey approved leaking material to a reporter anonymously, sources told ABC News.

Talking Feds with Harry Litman, Trump Gets RUDE AWAKENING in BOGUS COMEY CASE, Oct. 8, 2025. Harry breaks down the arraignment of James Comey that took place this morning in Virginia.

Daily Beast, Trump’s Comey Witch Hunt Hit by Bombshell Prosecution Leak, Ewan Palmer, Oct. 8, 2025. MAJOR PROBLEM. The former FBI director has denied the allegations brought forward by Trump-loyalist prosecutors.

Federal prosecutors investigating former FBI Director James Comey found that a key witness in their inquiry would be “problematic” and potentially undermine the entire case, according to a damaging leak.

Those investigating President Donald Trump’s nemesis found that testimony from Daniel Richman—a law professor whom prosecutors claim Comey authorized to leak information to the media—would contradict the claims central to the already shaky case, sources said. 

CNN, James Comey’s long, strange trip into the jaws of Donald Trump’s campaign of retribution, Marshall Cohen and Jeremy Herb, Oct. 8, 2025. Former FBIDirector James Comey wasn’t always atop President Donald Trump’s enemies list.

“You’ve had one heck of a year,” Trump, then the president-elect, said to Comey in January 2017, the first time they met face-to-face privately at Trump Tower in New York. Trump told Comey he had a “great reputation” and handled the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server “honorably,” according to Comey’s re-telling of their meeting in his 2018 memoir.

That might have been the high point of their relationship.

Moments later, the FBI director told Trump for the first time about the infamous “Steele dossier,” which alleged that Trump and his campaign colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election. It was a conversation that would ultimately send Comey spiraling down the path to becoming one of Trump’s chief villains.

Now, Comey is caught in the middle of Trump’s second-term retribution campaign, after he was charged last month with a two-count criminal indictment for allegedly lying to Congress in 2020 about leaks, which CNN has reported appears to be related to the FBI’s Clinton email investigation.

Comey, who has said he is “innocent” of the charges, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in Virginia Wednesday morning. A judge set his trial date for January 5, 2026.

Along the way, unlike his recent FBI predecessors, Comey forged an unprecedented decade-long path to becoming a major political actor, whose every action is weaponized by partisans from both sides for their own gain. He went from a Democratic scapegoat for the party’s 2016 election loss, to a catalyst for the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, to a prominent anti-Trump resistance figure, and now, a criminal defendant.

“Trump is the ultimate pugilist and Comey is his punching bag, because Comey pricks away at Trump’s ego and paranoia,” said Douglas Brinkley, CNN Presidential Historian and a history professor at Rice University. “History will look at them both with jaded eyes, over the fact that these two grown-ups put their country through so many nauseating news cycles of schoolyard one-upmanship.”

Here are the key moments that define the long and winding Trump-Comey grudge:Clinton bombshells roil 2016

Many Americans had probably never heard of Jim Comey before July 5, 2016.

That’s when – in the heat of a presidential campaign, with the party conventions just weeks away – Comey held an unprecedented 15-minute press conference explaining the results of the FBI’s yearlong investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server.

Comey blasted Clinton for being “extremely careless” with classified emails and said she “should have known” not to use a private server. But evidence of criminal intent was so lacking, he concluded, that “no reasonable prosecutor” would indict the Democratic nominee.

This was unheard of. Investigators rarely announce when an investigation doesn’t lead to charges. And it’s even less common for the FBI chief to publicly criticize a major political figure. Comey said he was providing this “unusual transparency” because “the American people deserve those details, in a case of intense public interest.”

Both sides were instantly enraged. Trump lashed out, saying it proved “the system is rigged.” And Clinton was livid that Comey veered from FBI norms of saying nothing publicly when an investigation ends without any charges.

For the next few months, Trump and Clinton duked it out on the campaign trail. Then, in late October, Comey came roaring back, telling Congress in a letter that the FBI was re-opening the Clinton probe after discovering new emails that belonged to her.

CNN reported at the time that Comey’s move, which was widely described as a potentially game-changing “October surprise,” reinvigorated Trump’s flailing campaign. (Some nonpartisan polling experts like Nate Silver later concluded that it probably cost Clinton the election.)

After the letter, Trump’s past attacks predictably turned into praise. (He said Comey had “a lot of guts.”) But that, too, was short-lived: One week later – a mere 48 hours before Election Day – Comey said the FBI was finished reviewing the new Clinton emails and reaffirmed its view that charges weren’t warranted.

Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign’s top spokesman, recently told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he still blames Comey for Trump’s 2016 victory but that he believes the charges against him are a “bone-chilling abuse of power.”

“There’s plenty of us that, to this day, feel that, but for the letter that Jim Comey sent to the Hill inappropriately about her email server, 11 days prior to the election, that the election outcome might have gone differently,” Fallon said. “There are plenty of people on our side of the aisle that are not fans of Jim Comey. And yet, none of that … justifies what has happened.”Trump tells Comey: ‘I need loyalty’

After the 2016 election, Comey was faced with even thornier political problems: The FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s suspicious ties to Russia, and how to handle a related dossier with salacious allegations involving the president-elect.

Two weeks before his swearing in, Trump was briefed at Trump Tower by a wider group of US intelligence leaders about their findings that Russia meddled to help him win the election. Comey asked to speak alone with the president-elect about an even more sensitive matter.

“As I spoke, I felt a strange out-of-body experience, as if I were watching myself speak to the new president about prostitutes in Russia,” Comey recalled in his 2018 book, referring to a salacious and now-discredited allegation in the dossier. “Before I finished, Trump interrupted sharply, with a dismissive tone. He was eager to protest that the allegations weren’t true.”

Just two days after Trump was sworn into office, Comey had a fateful and unsolicited embrace in the White House with the president during a gathering of law enforcement to thank them for their work on the inauguration. The footage would be replayed over and over again whenever Comey was back in the news.

Trump spotted Comey and called out for him. “He’s become more famous than me,” Trump said as Comey walked across the room and awkwardly shook hands with Trump, who leaned in to embrace his FBI director.

Trump’s one-on-one meetings with Comey continued, much to the chagrin of the FBI director, who began documenting them by writing memos of the conversations afterward.

At a January 2017 dinner, Trump told Comey, “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” Comey would later recall. The FBI director eventually responded he would provide “honesty” to the president.

The next month, after Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned because of the rapidly escalating Russia scandal, Trump asked to speak alone with Comey following a counterterrorism briefing.

Trump said of the FBI’s probe into Flynn: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go,” according to special counsel Mueller’s 2019 report.

In March, with the Russia allegations swirling in the press over the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Comey had yet another investigative bombshell to reveal publicly for the first time, at a House hearing about Russia’s election meddling.

“The FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts,” Comey said on March 20, 2017.

Later that month, the president asked Comey in a phone call to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation by saying Trump was not personally under investigation, Comey would recall. Comey responded that he would “see what we could do,” which he later explained was a way of “kind of getting off the phone.”

Instead, the cloud would only grow larger.Firing leads to ‘surreal’ Hill hearing

Several weeks later, Comey was on the other side of the country speaking to agents in the Los Angeles field office on May 9, 2017, when the headline blared across a television screen in his eyesight: “COMEY FIRED.”

Back in Washington, a White House aide had delivered to FBI headquarters a letter from Trump, which stated he was firing Comey based on recommendations from top Justice Department officials over his mishandling of the Clinton email probe.

But one day later, Trump revealed his underlying motivation for the firing. He told Russian officials in the Oval Office that he “faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

The next day, Trump went a step further in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, saying he was going to fire Comey regardless of the DOJ recommendation. “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”

Trump also made a veiled threat to Comey on Twitter, writing “James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Comey decided to share the memo of his Trump conversation related to the Flynn investigation with his friend and lawyer Dan Richman, who shared its contents with the New York Times.

“Now that I was a private citizen, I could do something,” Comey wrote. One day after stories about the memo were published, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced Mueller’s appointment.

Comey was invited to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, nearly one month after his firing. The June 8, 2017, hearing was a spectacle on Capitol Hill with anticipation rarely seen for congressional proceedings. The line to get into the hearing stretched around the Hart Senate Office Building. Hordes of reporters and photographers crowded in to witness Comey’s first public comments since his firing. Some bars in Washington, DC, even opened early for Comey watch-parties.

“I walked with the leaders of the committee down the long private hall behind the dais, turned left, and stepped into something surreal. I have seen lots of cameras in my day and heard my share of shutter clicks. Nothing compared to this scene,” Comey wrote in his book about entering the hearing.

During the hearing, Comey recalled his conversations with Trump and the circumstances surrounding his firing. “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” he said of Trump’s threat. (There were not tapes.)

“We truly did not know what he was going to say or how this hearing was going to go. In the end, 20 million Americans watched it live,” said Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “As long as I do this, I will probably never live through a crazier day.”DOJ watchdog excoriates Comey

The Mueller probe was in full swing by June 2018, when the Justice Department inspector general released a bombshell 568-page report that dragged the country’s attention back to the Clinton email investigation.

The report was a devastating blow to Comey, highlighting his missteps and blunders that the watchdog said were “extraordinary and insubordinate.”

New York Times, Comey to Appear in Court in Case That Has Roiled Justice Dept., Glenn Thrush, Oct. 8, 2025. The case against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, was deemed too thin by a previous federal prosecutor, who quit under pressure from President Trump.

The proceedings at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday morning will have the superficial trappings of any other arraignment: The accused will stand before a judge, hear the charges against him and sign the paperwork.

But the initial court appearance of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on charges of lying to Congress five years ago will be a highly unusual event with potentially enormous political and legal implications.

The indictment of Mr. Comey, who ordered the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, represented the most significant legal action taken against those President Trump has publicly targeted for retribution.

The case was presented to a grand jury on Sept. 25 — over the opposition of prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia — by Lindsey Halligan, a White House official hastily installed by Mr. Trump as U.S. attorney after her predecessor found insufficient evidence to indict Mr. Comey.

It came shortly after the president all but commanded Attorney General Pam Bondi, right, to take legal action against Mr. Comey; Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat; and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.

“Nothing is being done,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.”

Mr. Comey faces up to five years in prison if convicted, though many current and former prosecutors believe the case will be difficult to prove — if his lawyers do not succeed in getting the charges quickly dismissed.

“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way,” Mr. Comey said in a video released hours after he was charged.

“We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either,” added Mr. Comey, who has assembled a formidable defense team, including Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the former U.S. attorney in Chicago known for prosecuting major terrorism and corruption cases.

The arraignment was originally scheduled for Thursday, but the chief judge of the district court moved it up a day, citing logistical and security concerns.

The visuals of vengeance are of great importance to Mr. Trump, who rose to national prominence as a reality television star who often watched his broadcasts with the sound off to better judge how he looked.

An agent in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office was suspended after he refused to organize an escort of uniformed law enforcement officials to walk Mr. Comey into the courthouse before the media, according to people with knowledge of the move who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

It remains unclear how that would have worked. Thus far, Mr. Comey has only been issued a summons to appear in court, although arrests are not unheard-of in such cases.

In 2022, Peter Navarro, a longtime Trump adviser, was taken into custody and handcuffed as he boarded an airplane in Washington, an action criticized as overly aggressive by the judge in his case.

Ms. Halligan, who narrowly secured a two-count indictment after a shaky solo appearance before the grand jury, has had a hard time getting anyone in her new office to help her with the case, according to current and former prosecutors in the office.

Two prosecutors who work in the Eastern District of North Carolina, Tyler Lemons and Gabriel Diaz, gave official notice on Tuesday that they had been assigned to the case, according to court records.

The case has cast a corrosive pall over the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the most important federal prosecutor’s offices in the nation.

Erik S. Siebert, the district’s former U.S. attorney, came under pressure from Mr. Trump after telling his superiors in the Justice Department that there was not enough evidence against Mr. Comey or, in a separate potential case, Ms. James. Mr. Siebert quit on Sept. 19, hours after the president called for his ouster.

Since then, Trump Justice Department appointees have fired without cause two top career prosecutors who also objected to the Comey indictment. Many other officials in the Eastern District of Virginia have applied for jobs on the outside or have written memos justifying their actions in case they have to contest personnel actions or sue the department.

The bare-bones, two-page indictment against Mr. Comey was signed only by Ms. Halligan, a former defense lawyer for Mr. Trump who had been serving as a midlevel lawyer in the office of the White House staff secretary.

Mr. Comey was indicted on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020.

Court records indicate that Ms. Halligan also tried to get the grand jury to indict Mr. Comey on a second false statement charge, which was rejected.

Mr. Comey is not the first former head of the F.B.I. to face criminal charges. In 1978, a former acting head of the bureau during Watergate, L. Patrick Gray, was indicted on charges of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans.

Prosecutors said he authorized agents to break into homes without warrants, in a hunt for fugitive members of Weather Underground, the violent far-left group.

The charges against Mr. Gray were dropped two years later.

The Real Michael Cohen and Dean Bludell Podcast, Comey Perp walk / Indictment, Michael Cohen, Dean Blundell and Lev Parnas, Oct. 8, 2025. A recording from Michael Cohen and Dean Blundell's live video.

Justice Matters, Commentary: Trump's Vindictive Prosecution of James Comey Begins, Glenn Kirschner, right, Oct. 8, 2025. All the "King's" Men: Trump's lackeys and their disservice to America.

I was in the courtroom today when former FBI Director James Comey was arraigned on two felony charges: one for allegedly making false statements to Congress and a second for allegedly obstructing a congressional proceeding.

Donald Trump has been threatening for years to prosecute his enemies. This is the first vindictive prosecution that has actually been brought in court.

This video reviews, in detail, everything that happened in court today in the case of United States of American vs. James Comey.

For nightly live Law Talks, please join me on Substack: glennkirschner.substack.com

Daily Beast, Trump’s Comey Witch Hunt Hit by Bombshell Prosecution Leak, Ewan Palmer, Oct. 8, 2025. MAJOR PROBLEM. The former FBI director has denied the allegations brought forward by Trump-loyalist prosecutors.

Federal prosecutors investigating former FBI Director James Comey found that a key witness in their inquiry would be “problematic” and potentially undermine the entire case, according to a damaging leak.

Those investigating President Donald Trump’s nemesis found that testimony from Daniel Richman—a law professor whom prosecutors claim Comey authorized to leak information to the media—would contradict the claims central to the already shaky case, sources said. 

Sept. 27 

New York Times, The Testimony at the Heart of the Comey Indictment, Examined, Charlie Savage, Updated Sept. 27, 2025. The charges against the former F.B.I. director center on an appearance he made before a Senate committee in September 2020. Here’s a closer look.

At the center of the Trump administration’s indictment of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, is testimony he delivered before Congress in September 2020. But the details of the accusation against him remain murky because the indictment is extremely sparse. It was filed by a novice prosecutor installed days ago by President Trump to lead the Eastern District of Virginia after her predecessor refused to bring the case.

Here is a closer look at the indictment that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, obtained from a grand jury, along with a proposed charge the jury rejected.What are the charges against Mr. Comey?

The indictment charges Mr. Comey with one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding.

The false statement charge asserts that in appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, 2020, Mr. Comey told a U.S. senator that he “had not ‘authorized someone else at the F.B.I. to be an anonymous source in news reports’ regarding an F.B.I. investigation concerning” an unnamed person. But in fact, the indictment says, Mr. Comey had authorized someone to do so.

Sept. 26 

Politico, Donald Trump’s US attorneys, unvetted by the Senate, move full steam ahead, Erica Orden and Hailey Fuchs, Sept. 26, 2025. Some have displayed far more obedience to Trump than full-time U.S. attorneys have ever shown to presidents they served under.

President Donald Trump has just two Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys in place. That hasn’t stopped him from leaning on unvetted and newly minted prosecutors to harness the power of the Justice Department against his political enemies.

In the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump personal attorney who has never prosecuted a case, on Thursday secured the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey three days after Trump ousted an experienced prosecutor to install Halligan on a temporary basis.

In the Northern District of New York, John Sarcone, also a first-time prosecutor, is investigating New York Attorney General Letitia James, another Trump foe. Sarcone is serving in the U.S. attorney role indefinitely without Senate confirmation because Trump used a procedural maneuver to keep him there even after district judges, empowered to appoint temporary federal prosecutors, declined to name him to the post.

And in New Jersey, another former Trump personal attorney with no previous prosecutorial experience, Alina Habba, is prosecuting a Democratic member of Congress who was attempting to conduct an oversight visit at an immigration detention center. Habba, too, is serving as U.S. attorney indefinitely without Senate confirmation, although the legitimacy of her authority is being challenged.

Around the country, nearly all of Trump’s U.S. attorney nominees have been unable to receive confirmation by the Senate. Some of his nominees are so inexperienced or have a history of so much politicized conduct that they cannot win confirmation even in a Republican-controlled Senate. Other nominees might have enough votes to be confirmed, but Democrats have successfully blocked them.

Without Senate-vetted appointees, most of the country’s 93 U.S. attorney offices are being led by interim leaders — and some of them have displayed far more obedience to Trump, and his desire for retribution, than full-time U.S. attorneys have ever shown to presidents they served under. Historically, U.S. attorneys have tended to guard their offices’ authority to work relatively independently even from Justice Department headquarters and certainly from the White House.

That’s no longer the case in the first eight months of Trump’s second term, said Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor and former Westchester County district attorney. “It’s changing the whole culture of the office,” she said. 

New York Times, Trump Administration Updates: Comey Indicted After Pressure From President, Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, Sept. 26, 2025 (print ed.). 

A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted James B. Comey, shown in a file photo above, the former F.B.I. director, a culmination of President Trump’s relentless demand for retribution after the bureau investigated his 2016 presidential campaign over possible ties to Russia.

Mr. Comey was indicted on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020.

The indictment, filed in Alexandria, Va., came over the objection of career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia who found insufficient evidence to support charges but were overruled by Lindsey Halligan, a Trump loyalist handpicked by the president to run the office a few days ago.

It represents the most significant legal step yet by the Trump administration to harry, punish and humiliate a former official the president identified as an enemy, at the expense of procedural safeguards intended to shield the Justice Department from political interference and personal vendettas.

The bare-bones, two-page indictment was signed only by Ms. Halligan, left, a former defense lawyer for Mr. Trump who personally presented the case to the jury, despite her lack of any previous prosecutorial experience. Typically such filings are also endorsed by career prosecutors who have gathered the evidence in the case.

Court records indicate that Ms. Halligan also tried to get the grand jury to indict Mr. Comey on a second false statement charge, and that it was rejected.

For a charging document as consequential as indicting a former F.B.I. director, the filing is not particularly revealing. It asserts that Mr. Comey falsely claimed during the hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had not authorized someone else at the F.B.I. to be an anonymous source in news reports regarding an investigation into “Person 1,” which appears to be a reference to Hillary Clinton.

“That statement was false,” the indictment charges, because Mr. Comey “had in fact authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an F.B.I. investigation concerning PERSON 1.”

The document does not identify either Person 1 or Person 3, but at the hearing, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, pressed Mr. Comey on whether he had ever authorized his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, to discuss an investigation with a reporter. Mr. Comey stood by his answers at past hearings and denied doing so.

Career prosecutors who looked at the evidence against Mr. Comey thought the case was far too weak to justify an indictment, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. For one thing, the key exchange was brief. For another, it referred to testimony from three years earlier, and Mr. Comey said he stood by those answers without elaborating.

The vague description of authorizing someone at the F.B.I. to share information with a journalist could also apply to a different episode from that period. Republicans have criticized Mr. Comey over designating a college professor he trusted, Daniel Richman, as a special government employee who then spoke to a reporter for The New York Times.

The wording of the indictment leaves unclear which of those two situations is at issue, though in recent days investigators had re-interviewed Mr. Richman, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Comey faces up to five years in prison if convicted, although many current and former prosecutors believe the case will be difficult to prove.

Shortly after the indictment was made public, Troy A. Edwards, Jr., Mr. Comey’s son-in-law, resigned his post as a prosecutor in the office that brought charges against the former F.B.I. director.

Mr. Edwards, who helped prosecute Jan. 6 rioters, including members of the far-right Oath Keepers, said in an email to his supervisor that he left to “uphold his duty to the Constitution and country.”

In a video statement, Mr. Comey declared his innocence and welcomed an opportunity to vindicate himself in a trial. “We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either.”

Referring to his daughter, Maurene, who was dismissed this summer from her own post at the Justice Department, he added, “Somebody that I love dearly recently said that fear is the tool of a tyrant, and she’s right, but I’m not afraid, and I hope you’re not either.”

Mr. Trump praised the move, posting on Truth Social shortly after the indictment was announced. “JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” he wrote.

Senator Mark Warner, right, Democrat of Virginia, in a statement, warned that the indictment underscored how the president intended to deploy the justice system. “This kind of interference is a dangerous abuse of power,” he said. “Our system depends on prosecutors making decisions based on evidence and the law, not on the personal grudges of a politician determined to settle scores.”

Mr. Trump, who claims his actions are motivated by the weaponization of government against him, has intensified his public pressure campaign on the Justice Department in recent days. He has publicly called upon Pam Bondi, the attorney general, to use her power to go after adversaries he has described as “scum,” including Mr. Comey and Letitia James, the New York attorney general who sued Mr. Trump for inflating the value of his assets.

Ms. Bondi, left, and her top deputy have quietly raised concerned that the case against Mr. Comey was too weak to result in convictions, according to current and former officials. But she appeared to embrace the move on social media post, without mentioning Mr. Comey by name, writing: “No one is above the law.”

The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, suggested on social media that the indictment would not be the administration’s last against what he referred to as “previous corrupt leadership and their enablers.” He added: “Everyone, especially those in positions of power, will be held to account - no matter their perch.”

Many current and former Justice Department officials said they viewed the filing of criminal charges against Mr. Comey as deeply troubling. The consequences could be far-reaching, they argued, including the resignations of more prosecutors over how the Trump administration has sought to use the agency, and the erosion of public trust in U.S. attorneys.  

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 25, 2025 [Trump's Push for Complete Control of Government], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 26, 2025. 

Days after Trump demanded that the Department of Justice move “now” to prosecute those he perceives to be his enemies, a federal grand jury has indicted former FBI director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress and obstructing an investigation. Comey was an early casualty of Trump’s first administration, fired after he refused to kill the FBI investigation of the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.

Over last weekend, Trump exploded at then–acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert, a career prosecutor, after Siebert concluded there was not enough evidence of a crime to charge Comey for allegedly lying to Congress or New York attorney general Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud.

On Monday Trump replaced Siebert with White House aide and Trump’s former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan, right, and yesterday three sources told Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MSNBC that they expected Halligan to try to get a grand jury to indict Comey before the five-year statute of limitations on lying to Congress runs out next Tuesday.

Tonight the DOJ delivered an indictment against Comey.

“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” Comey said tonight in a video. “But we…will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either. Somebody that I love dearly recently said that fear is the tool of a tyrant, and she’s right, but I’m not afraid, and I hope you’re not either. I hope instead you are engaged, you are paying attention, and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does. My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system. I’m innocent. So let’s have a trial and keep the faith.”

The DOJ was busy today. It also sued six states—California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—toforce them to hand over their voter rolls and information identifying those voters. Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket notes that state officials from both Democratic and Republican governments have questioned why the government wants that information. This lawsuit comes after a nearly identical lawsuit the DOJ filed last week against Maine and Oregon.

 

Former FBI Director James Comey is sworn in remotely from his home during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing exploring the FBI's investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian election interference in Washington, U.S on , Sept. 30, 2020 (Photo via U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee).

Politico, 'Let's have a trial': Comey proclaims innocence as Trump revels in grand jury indictment he demanded, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, Sept. 26, 2025 (print ed.).  A grand jury indicted the former FBI director on two felony charges stemming from congressional testimony he gave in September 2020.James Comey is sworn via videoconference.

Federal prosecutors in Virginia have charged former FBI Director James Comey with obstruction and making a false statement to Congress, just days after President Donald Trump publicly implored his Justice Department to quickly seek indictments of his perceived foes and ousted a U.S. attorney who resisted.

A grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicted Comey on Thursday on two felony charges stemming from Comey’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020 about the FBI’s investigation into links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.

The obstruction of Congress charge accuses Comey of making “false statements” at that hearing, but is silent about what they were.

The false statement charge relates to Comey’s denial at the hearing that he authorized anyone at the FBI to speak to the media anonymously about FBI investigations related to Trump or his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton. Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, left, told investigators with DOJ’s inspector general that Comey authorized him to talk to a reporter about an aspect of an investigation the FBI conducted into the Clinton Foundation.

In a video posted online Thursday night, the former FBI chief and onetime deputy attorney general proclaimed his innocence — and hinted at a strategy for challenging the case against him as an act of political vengeance by Trump himself.

“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either,” Comey said. “My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I’m innocent, so, let’s have a trial.”

Comey appeared to allude to the July firing of his daughter, Maurene Comey, who had been a federal prosecutor in Manhattan for nearly a decade. The indictment also prompted the resignation Thursday of Troy Edwards, a senior federal prosecutor in Alexandria who is married to another of James Comey’s daughters, three people familiar with the development said.

Edwards, deputy chief of the office’s national security section, said in a one-line resignation letter that he was quitting “to uphold my oath to the Constitution and country.”

Trump quickly reveled in the indictment of his longtime foe, declaring “Justice in America!” and calling Comey “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to.” He closed the post with his campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

Prosecutors sought the indictment of the former FBI director just before a Sept. 30 legal deadline that would have put criminal charges out of reach because the statute of limitations would have expired.

Notably, a court document released Thursday night showed the same grand jury refused to indict Comey on a second charge of making a false statement to Congress. The charge jurors balked at pertained to a statement Comey made during the hearing where he appeared to deny having read a report sent to top FBI officials in September 2016 about the Clinton campaign’s interest in using Trump’s alleged Russia ties to distract from her own legal woes.

Justice Department officials did not address the failed charge, but declared that the two felonies leveled at Comey showed justice being done. Each of the two felony charges Comey faces carries a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.

“No one is above the law,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X shortly after word of the charges against Comey emerged. “Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case.”

New York Times, News Analysis, Trump Gets the Retribution He Sought, and Shatters Norms in the Process, Alan Feuer, Jonah E. Bromwich and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 26, 2025 (print ed.). A prosecutor’s drive to indict James Comey trampled over the Justice Department’s long tradition of keeping a distance from politics and the White House, and raised the prospect of more arbitrary charges.

The clearest way to understand the extraordinary nature of the indictment on Thursday of James B. Comey, left, the former F.B.I. director, is to offer up a simple recitation of the facts.

An inexperienced prosecutor loyal to President Trump, in the job for less than a week, filed criminal charges against one of her boss’s most-reviled opponents. She did so not only at Mr. Trump’s direct command, but also against the urging of both her own subordinates and her predecessor, who had just been fired for raising concerns that there was insufficient evidence to indict.

The charges, which were filed around 7 p.m. in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., thrust the Justice Department into perilous new territory. The push for the indictment trampled over the agency’s long tradition of maintaining distance from the White House and resisting political pressure, and it raised the prospect of further arbitrary prosecutions pushed by Mr. Trump against his enemies.

Heightening the break-glass moment, the felony charges against Mr. Comey, who stands accused of making false statements and obstructing justice, were rushed into court as Mr. Trump’s handpicked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, hurried to beat the quickly approaching statute of limitations on Mr. Comey’s purported crimes.

The rush to prosecute Mr. Comey was the clearest example yet of how the normal process of justice has been reversed under Mr. Trump, showing how the president came into his second term with targets already in mind and ultimately pressured the Justice Department, over a degree of internal resistance, into finding a way to charge a former director of the F.B.I.

Ms. Halligan, who had been working as a top official in the White House staff secretary’s office and had previously served as a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump, had until now never prosecuted a single case in her career.

Mr. Trump nevertheless appointed her as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia on Monday afternoon, after publicly berating Attorney General Pam Bondi, left, on Saturday night for not moving more aggressively to prosecute Mr. Comey and two other figures who are longtime targets of his retribution campaign, Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California.

Although Ms. Halligan had not been fully briefed on the Comey case before arriving and despite an energetic effort by the career professionals under her to dissuade her from bringing charges, she did exactly that. In a highly unusual move for a top federal prosecutor, she personally presented the case against Mr. Comey to the grand jury, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

National Review, Analysis: Was Lindsey Halligan Validly Appointed as United States Attorney? Ed Whelan, right, Sept. 26, 2025. Ed Whelan holds the AntoninScalia Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. A regular contributor to National Review’s blog Bench Memos, he has closely covered every Supreme Court confirmation since 2005.

There is a lot that is outrageous about the process that resulted in yesterday’s indictment of James Comey. I will focus here on what appears to be a fatal legal flaw.

As I understand the facts, it seems highly doubtful that Lindsey Halligan has been validly appointed as United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. If her appointment is invalid, so is her indictment of Comey.

Section 546 of Title 28 of the United States Code authorizes an Attorney General to appoint an interim United States Attorney for a term of 120 days. Under section 546(d), once the 120-day term expires, “the district court for such district may appoint a United States attorney to serve until the vacancy is filled.”

Acting Attorney General James McHenry evidently appointed Erik Siebert as interim United States Attorney on January 21, 2025. After his 120-day term expired, the judges of the Eastern District of Virginia appointed him to continue to serve.

On May 6, President Trump nominated Siebert to be United States Attorney. His nomination had advanced to the Senate floor when Trump learned that Siebert had “told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against [New York attorney general Letitia] James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey.” Siebert then resigned as interim United States Attorney, or Trump fired him. (Trump insists on the latter: “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”)

Can the Attorney General make a second interim appointment under section 546 when the first interim appointment has expired? The most natural reading of section 546 is that the authority to make the interim appointment then lies with the district court. And that’s evidently the position that the Department of Justice itself adopted in a 1986 Office of Legal Counsel opinion written by none other than Samuel Alito, right.That opinion itself might not be in the public domain (update: it is, and here), but a 1993 OLC opinion (p. 3 n. 5) states that the Alito opinion “suggest[s] that the Attorney General may not make successive interim appointments pursuant to section 546.”

That doesn’t mean that the president can’t temporarily fill the office with a pick of his own. As a 2003 OLC opinion by yours truly explains, the Vacancies Reform Act is a separate source of authority. But while there are many individuals whom Trump could have appointed as “acting” United States Attorney pursuant to the Vacancies Reform Act, Halligan doesn’t qualify: She isn’t serving as a Senate-confirmed officer in another position, and she hadn’t been in the Department of Justice at all, much less for the 90 days required.

So it should be a simple matter for the federal district judge to dismiss Halligan’s indictment of Comey.

On the substance of the indictment, I defer to Andy McCarthy, who writes that the indictment “is so ill-conceived and incompetently drafted [that Comey] should be able to get it thrown out on a pretrial motion to dismiss. 

National Review, Analysis: The Indictment Against Comey Should Be Dismissed, Andrew C. McCarthy, right (a senior fellow at National Review Institute, a former federal prosecutor, and author of "Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency"), Sept. 26, 2025. It’s an incomprehensible case. 

Jim Comey has a dilemma.

The vindictive indictment the Trump Justice Department barely managed to get a grand jury to approve on Thursday is so ill-conceived and incompetently drafted, he should be able to get it thrown out on a pretrial motion to dismiss. Legally, he’ll be entitled to that, and it would short-circuit the very expensive and punitive litigation process.

Yet, the case has been randomly assigned to a Biden-appointee in the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge Michael Nachmanoff. If Judge Nachmanoff throws the case out pretrial, President Trump and his supporters will rail that the fix was in.  

Legal AF, Trump Comey INDICTMENT HEADED for DISMISSAL Already?!?! Michael Popok, Sept. 26, 2025. Popok digs deep into the late night indictment of Former FBI Director James Comey and, bringing the receipts and video clips, explains how weak it really is for perjury and obstruction and why Comey has a very good shot at convincing Judge Nachmanoff (a Biden appointee) to dismiss it early.

July 16

Fired federal prosecutor Maureen Comey, left, is shown in a collage with one of her convicted targets, sex trafficker and Trump friend Ghislaine Maxwell, now serving a 20-year prison term after convictions for trafficking young women with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.

ABC News, Maurene Comey, federal prosecutor in Sean 'Diddy' Combs and Ghislaine Maxwell cases, fired: Sources, Katherine Faulders, Mike Levine, and Aaron Katersky, July 16, 2025. Comey is the daughter of former FBI director James Comey. According to sources, President Donald Trump privately vented about having a Comey work in his administration.

The Justice Department on Wednesday fired Maurene Comey from the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, where she most recently led the prosecution of Sean "Diddy" Combs, multiple sources told ABC News.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a call for comment.

Comey was a highly regarded assistant U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell, the former associate of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and multiple gang members before the split verdict earlier this month in the trial of Combs, who was convicted of a prostitution-related charge but acquitted of more serious charges.

Comey was also involved in the office's case against Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 at New York City's Metropolitan Correctional Center while he was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

Comey is the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, who President Donald Trump fired during his first term in office because he initiated the Russia investigation.

According to sources, Trump privately vented about having a Comey work in his administration.

This marks the latest shake-up for the nation's most prominent federal prosecutor's office.

In April, the office's top prosecutor, Matthew Podolsky, agreed to step aside, clearing the way for Trump to install Jay Clayton, his nominee for interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York,

Podolsky had taken over for Danielle Sassoon, who in February resigned in protest of the Justice Department's order to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.

Sassoon had been named interim U.S. attorney by Trump when the president fired Edward Kim, who assumed the role during the change in administrations.

 

James Prosecution: In Depth 

 

Letitia James has only once reported rental income associated with the house. In 2020, she said that she had made between $1,000 and $5,000 from it (New York Times photo by Gregg Vigliotti).

Oct. 24

New York Times, Letitia James Case Shows Ruthlessness of Justice Dept. in Trump’s Grip, Oct. 24, 2025. For the Trump administration, creating an aura of criminality around the indicted New York attorney general — through public scrutiny of her and her relatives — may be as important as a conviction.

The Justice Department’s indictment of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, is merely one part of a multipronged campaign that is helping define retribution in President Trump’s second term.

Over the summer, Ms. James’s office received a criminal subpoena demanding information about her yearslong civil investigation into the president. This month, a Virginia grand jury handed up charges accusing her of bank fraud and false statements to financial institutions stemming from her mortgage paperwork.

And in recent days, Trump-aligned media outlets have run scathing headlines about her relatives’ criminal records, amplifying the specter of wrongdoing created by the Justice Department. On Friday, Ms. James, who has said the charges have no merit, will appear in a Virginia court at the defendant’s table, formally facing allegations instead of pursuing them.

Mr. Trump’s crusade against those he believes wronged him may once have been interpreted as a tit-for-tat effort to go after his enemies. But it is becoming clear that creating the trappings of criminality — the headlines, the scrutiny, the reputational damage — is as much a part of the formula as any realistic chance of conviction.

The escalating campaign against Ms. James shows the power and utility of a Justice Department in the grip of a vengeful president: It can embarrass, distract and weaken political rivals and do favors for Mr. Trump, who is still seething over the many investigations that targeted him — and at times his family — both in and out of office.

The disruption and expense of a legal defense could constrain one of Mr. Trump’s most potent adversaries. Ms. James is one of the leaders of a coalition of Democratic attorneys general that has sued him 40 times to protect the interests of their constituents against the administration’s policies.

The criminal investigation into her office, meanwhile, could undermine the remaining consequences of the civil fraud lawsuit she brought against him. Though a roughly half-billion-dollar penalty assessed by a New York judge last year was recently thrown out by an appeals court, other punishments — including an independent monitor overseeing the Trump Organization’s business operations — are still in place.

Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former U.S. attorney during the Obama administration, said that prosecutors have traditionally been trained to treat the subjects of investigations and defendants with respect, to protect the bedrock American principle that citizens are innocent until proven guilty.

“When you have a president saying they’re guilty as hell before they are charged, it seems like the process is working in reverse,” she said. “It seems that humiliation is the goal instead of humiliation being a collateral consequence of a conviction. It’s the tail wagging the dog.”

A White House spokeswoman referred a request for comment to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.

The Trump administration has accused several of the president’s enemies of mortgage fraud, but the case against Ms. James is the first of those allegations to result in an indictment. And cases involving home mortgages, by their very nature, drag defendants’ private lives into the public eye for months, long before a jury can evaluate whether a crime was committed.

Such charges could be a potent weapon against almost anyone the administration sees fit to target.

Criminal allegations, inevitably, set off intrigue and public scrutiny of defendants. In the past, federal prosecutors have generally sought to avoid stoking those fires.

The Trump administration has been different. After the previous top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia told officials that he did not believe Ms. James’s conduct merited charges, he was pushed out and replaced with a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, Lindsey Halligan. Ms. Halligan then took the case before a grand jury, overruling career prosecutors who had expressed skepticism.

New York Times, Letitia James to Appear in Court as Battle Over Trump-Urged Prosecution Begins, Jonah E. Bromwich and Devlin Barrett, Oct. 24, 2025. The New York attorney general, indicted by President Trump’s handpicked prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, is expected to plead not guilty in her arraignment on Friday.

New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, is set to appear in federal court in Norfolk, Va., on Friday morning for an arraignment where she is expected to plead not guilty to charges lodged by the Trump administration that she misled a bank to get more favorable mortgage terms.

The hearing for Ms. James, her first court appearance since being indicted this month, is a routine opening procedure in a prosecution that is anything but. How her case, which was pursued at President Trump’s demand over the objections of career prosecutors, plays out could hold signals for the president’s wider efforts to seek retribution against his perceived enemies.

Ms. James has said the charges against her — one count of bank fraud and one count of making a false statement to a financial institution — are “baseless.” Her indictment, she has said, is “nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system.”

Ms. James stands accused of lying about her purpose in buying a house in Virginia in 2020. Prosecutors say that while she said the house would be a secondary residence, she in fact used it as a “rental investment property,” renting it to a family of three.

But Ms. James’s great-niece has lived in the house since 2020, and testified to a Norfolk grand jury that she does not pay rent. Ms. James has reported only $1,350 in rent from the property on her tax forms.

Career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia who had reviewed the evidence had concluded it did not support criminal charges, but the president abruptly forced out the U.S. attorney who had been overseeing the office and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide who had no prosecutorial experience.

Soon after her appointment, Ms. Halligan secured a grand jury indictment against Ms. James and, in an unrelated case, false statement and obstruction charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director. Mr. Trump had publicly implored Justice Department officials to charge Ms. James and Mr. Comey with crimes, calling them “guilty as hell.” Both have been longtime antagonists of the president, and Ms. James had won a civil case for business fraud against him in New York.

Arraignments are generally brief proceedings for the defendant to enter a formal plea. But the day will also mark the beginning of Mr. Lowell’s efforts to persuade the judge to dismiss the case before it can go to trial.

On the eve of her court appearance, lawyers for Ms. James told the court that they intend to challenge the legality of Ms. Halligan’s appointment, as was already done by Mr. Comey’s legal team. The filing by Ms. James’s lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, suggests both those efforts could be joined into a single case for a judge to hear.

Separately, Ms. James’s lawyer also asked the judge overseeing her case to warn Ms. Halligan about making any extrajudicial comments about the case. Earlier this month, Ms. Halligan sent a series of argumentative texts to a reporter at Lawfare, a national security website. In the texts, Ms. Halligan pushed back against some descriptions of the evidence, arguing that her case is stronger than some of the reporting would suggest.

“These extrajudicial statements and prejudicial disclosures by any prosecutor, let alone one purporting to be the U.S. attorney, run afoul of and violate the federal rules of criminal procedure, the code of federal regulations, this court’s local rules, various rules of ethical and professional responsibility and D.O.J.’s justice manual,” Mr. Lowell wrote.

He urged the judge to intervene “to prevent any further disclosures by government attorneys and agents of investigative and case materials, and statements to the media and public.”

Oct. 14

CBS News, Watchdog group seeks probe of Comey, Letitia James cases, Scott Mcfarlane, Oct. 14, 2025. Former federal ethics officials who served in Republican and Democratic administrations are asking the Justice Department's inspector general to investigate the prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

In a letter obtained by CBS News, ethics officials who worked in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations urged a formal review of interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan's decision to prosecute Comey and James.

They sent their request Tuesday to Acting Justice Department Inspector General William Blier, writing, "Ms. Halligan pursued these indictments to fulfill President Donald J. Trump's longstanding personal vendetta against Mr. Comey and Ms. James, we are facing a turning point in our democracy and some of the most egregious examples of vindictive and meritless prosecution that our nation has ever seen."

The letter was written by leaders of the Democracy Defenders Fund, a Washington-based nonpartisan group that has frequently been critical of the Trump administration.

The group is led by Norm Eisen, former ethics official for President Barack Obama; Richard Painter, a former associate counsel to President George W. Bush; and Virginia Canter, a former White House associate counsel to Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama.

Their letter also said, "A president should never order prosecutions of his enemies. That happens in Putin's Russia, and it has happened in other dictatorships, but not here–until now."

Comey and Mr. Trump have had a contentious relationship for years. Comey, who was FBI director when Mr. Trump took office in 2017, was fired later that year by the president. Initially, the White House indicated he had been ousted over his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server, but the president later told NBC News' Lester Holt that he had the FBI's Russia investigation on his mind and had terminated Comey because of "this Russia thing with Trump and Russia." New Yorker Favorites

Oct. 13

Associated Press, New York Attorney General Letitia James, facing fraud charges, strikes defiant tone at Mamdani rally, Philip Marcelo, Oct. 13, 2025. New York Attorney General Letitia James struck a defiant tone Monday during her first public appearance since being indicted on federal fraud charges related to her purchase of a home in Virginia.

The Democrat took the stage to thunderous and sustained applause and chants of “We love Tish” during a boisterous rally for New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in the city’s Washington Heights neighborhood.

James warned of “powerful voices trying to silence truth and punish dissent” and “weaponize justice for political gain,” though she stopped short of naming President Donald Trump, who had pushed for months for Justice Department officials to bring charges against her.

“We are witnessing the fraying of our democracy, the erosion of our system of government,” James said. “This, my friends, is a defining moment in our history.”

She called on supporters to protect “every norm and every rule of law” as she vowed she “will not capitulate.”\

Oct. 12

The New Yorker, Commentary: The Indictment of Letitia James and the Collapse of Impartial Justice, Ruth Marcus,right, Oct. 12, 2025. The question raised by the prosecution of James is: would any other federal prosecutor have brought this case against any other defendant? The answer seems to be no.

“One tier of justice for all Americans,” the U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi, wrote Thursday on X, shortly after a federal grand jury in Virginia indicted the New York attorney general, Letitia James, on charges of bank fraud and making false statements. Bondi had made a similar point, two weeks before, after the indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey. “No one is above the law,” she proclaimed.

This self-satisfied triumphalism misconstrues the danger posed by the prosecutions of James and Comey—and by the other cases that President Donald Trump has demanded be brought against his perceived political enemies, which may soon follow.

The issue here, contrary to the Administration’s framing, is not that these individuals had previously evaded accountability for allegedly criminal activity. (Those worried about the powerful being able to skirt the law should refer to Trump v. United States, in which the Supreme Court granted Presidents near-complete immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. Some people, it turns out, actually are above the law.)

Rather, the problem with the Trump-directed prosecutions is about a different, and even more pernicious, form of unequal treatment: that this Administration will use the justice system to selectively punish those who incur the President’s wrath. The essence of impartial justice is treating like conduct alike—not identifying the target and then finding the crime.

Trump’s supporters often insist that Democrats, including James, weaponized the justice system against him first. Indeed, James, while running for attorney general back in 2018, had some intemperate and ill-advised words for Trump. “I will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate President,” she vowed.

After she was elected, her statements were even more pointed, and even more arguably improper for a law-enforcement official: “As the next attorney general of his home state, I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real-estate dealings.”

In office, James delivered. She brought a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump, his children, and his company, accusing them of having inflated the value of their properties to lenders and insurers in order to obtain more favorable terms. The judge who heard the case, Arthur Engoron, sided with James. “The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience,” he wrote in his decision, imposing a fine that, with interest, grew to more than half a billion dollars. (In August, a divided appeals court ruled that the penalty was excessive, but let the fraud conviction stand so that it could be reviewed by a higher court.)

More to the point, even if James misused her office to go after Trump, the acceptable reaction is not to repeat that offense. Trump may be a self-described counterpuncher, but payback has no place in the “Principles of Federal Prosecution,” the bible that governs how federal prosecutors should conduct themselves. And so the question raised by the indictment of James is: would any other federal prosecutor have brought this case against any other defendant? The indictment is, like the Comey charges, notably lacking in detail—but the answer seems to be a resounding no.Get insight and analysis from Washington and beyond when you sign up for our News & Politics newsletter.

Given that Trump had publicly demanded that James be prosecuted, her indictment was hardly unexpected. The precise fraud alleged, however, was a surprise. In April, Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, sent the Department of Justice a “criminal referral” that cited James’s 2023 purchase of a house in Norfolk, Virginia. James, Pulte charged, had said on one form that the property would be her “primary residence,” though it was actually for her niece—a fact that James had stated elsewhere. Instead, the indictment focussed on James’s purchase of another house in Norfolk in 2020, for a hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars. In the process of buying this other property, James had signed a “second-home rider” that, according to the indictment, required her “to occupy and use the property as her secondary residence.” The rider itself, containing standard language from Fannie Mae, stipulated that James would “keep the Property available primarily as a residence for Borrower’s personal use and enjoyment for at least one year.”

The indictment alleges that James did not use the property as her second home; instead, it asserts, she rented the house to a family of three, although it does not provide specifics. It also states that James’s application for homeowner’s insurance described the property as “owner-occupied,” even though her federal tax forms treated it as “rental real estate.” By obtaining the mortgage for a second home rather than for an investment, according to the indictment, James was able to borrow at a lower rate (three per cent as opposed to 3.815 per cent) and receive a larger seller credit. This “scheme and artifice to defraud” lenders “by means of false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises” resulted in nearly nineteen thousand dollars in “ill-gotten gains” over the life of the loan, the indictment alleges.

Does all this rise to the level of a crime that federal prosecutors usually pursue? Do these actions constitute “tremendous breaches of the public trust,” as the newly Trump-installed U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer with no previous prosecutorial experience, claimed? Federal mortgage-fraud prosecutions are exceptionally rare. In 2024, only thirty-eight people were sentenced for federal mortgage fraud, four more than in the previous year, according to statistics compiled by the United States Sentencing Commission. The amount allegedly at issue in the James case is so paltry that it would not normally draw the attention of federal prosecutors. The fraud that James supposedly committed is seldom prosecuted as a standalone offense. “I do not know of a single instance in which a prosecution was brought based solely on occupancy fraud, much less for renting out a second home,” Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown who specializes in consumer-finance law and mortgage contracts, told me. For example, the former Trump-campaign chair Paul Manafort, was accused of occupancy fraud, after he claimed that his daughter lived in a SoHo condominium in order to obtain a larger mortgage, but it was part of a sprawling twenty-five count indictment. In addition, as Molly Roberts noted on Lawfare, it’s unclear whether James even violated the second-home restrictions; Fannie Mae rewrote the rider language in 2019 to clarify that homeowners can indeed let their properties, even during the first year of ownership. James’s New York State financial-disclosure forms only reported income from the property—between one thousand and five thousand dollars—in a single year, 2020. According to a source familiar with James’s finances, the house was occupied by James’s great-niece, who did not pay rent and has lived there for years.

Even if prosecutors can show that James violated the terms of the loan, they will also face the hurdle of proving that any such deception was intentional. “An occupancy fraud charge like the one brought against James is very hard to prove standing alone because it requires proving that the borrower never intended to keep the occupancy promise,” Levitin observed. It’s no wonder that Halligan’s predecessor reportedly refused to bring the charges against James, and career prosecutors balked as well. “Bottom line: this is a very, very weak case that looks like prosecutorial misconduct, frankly,” Levitin said. “It’s a case that would never be brought if there were not a political vendetta against James.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James, facing fraud charges, strikes defiant tone at Mamdani rallyNew York Attorney General Letitia James has struck a defiant tone as she faces federal fraud charges.

This case does not reflect “one tier of justice for all Americans.” Prosecutors, who have limited resources, are supposed to exercise discretion, not exact retribution. The “Principles of Federal Prosecution” caution that a “determination to prosecute represents a policy judgment that the fundamental interests of society require the application of federal criminal law to a particular set of circumstances.” The indictment of James serves only one fundamental interest: Trump’s insatiable thirst for revenge.  

Oct. 11

New York Times, In the Eye of a Political Storm, a Tiny Yellow House in Norfolk, Va., Jonah E. Bromwich, Kate Kelly and Stefanos Chen, Oct. 11, 2025. Attorney General Letitia James of New York purchased the $137,000 home for a grandniece who needed tranquillity. Prosecutors say it is an impermissible investment property.

Five years ago, the door of a modest yellow house on a quiet stretch of avenue in Norfolk, Va., swung open to admit a young family looking for a peaceful life after years of turbulence in several cities.

The family, Nakia Thompson and her children, have lived at the address ever since, according to two people familiar with the home, and until this week, the plan for a more placid existence had largely gone as expected. Several times a year, the people said, a great-aunt who had purchased the house in 2020 with Ms. Thompson in mind would come for an extended stay.

This week, with the filing of court papers some 200 miles north, the plan came to an abrupt end. The great-aunt — Letitia James, the New York attorney general — was indicted by President Trump’s Justice Department. The yellow house, with its gabled roof and tidy lawn, was revealed to be at the heart of the case that Mr. Trump’s chosen prosecutor brought against Ms. James, one of the president’s most prominent adversaries.

In the indictment, the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, accuses Ms. James of having misrepresented the purpose of the house when she purchased it in August 2020 for $137,000. The indictment says that while Ms. James indicated to her mortgage broker that she expected to use the house as a second home, she had instead used it as a “rental investment property, renting the property to a family.”

But in June, Ms. Thompson testified to a grand jury in Norfolk that she had lived in the house for years and that she did not pay rent, a person familiar with her testimony said. She was not asked to testify again, and the grand jury that voted to indict Ms. James was not seated in Norfolk, but in Alexandria.

The specter of Mr. Trump’s revenge campaign has so far overshadowed the facts of the case, given how he has pushed for Ms. James’s punishment. For years, he has railed against her on social media, calling her a “crook” and “corrupt.” Last month, he also appointed Ms. Halligan, once one of his personal lawyers, to replace Erik S. Siebert, the previous U.S. attorney in Eastern Virginia. Mr. Siebert had cast doubt on the case, as had career prosecutors in the office.

That sequence of events has prompted outrage from Democrats and even some Republicans, as has the paltry amount Ms. James is accused of having stood to gain — $18,933. But Mr. Trump’s allies celebrated the indictment, calling it airtight and suggesting that it represents fair play against a state attorney general who had sued Mr. Trump in 2022, accusing him of “staggering fraud.”

A lawyer for Ms. James, Abbe D. Lowell, has flatly denied the charges on her behalf. Ms. Halligan, in a statement, said that they represented “tremendous breaches of the public’s trust.”

Ms. Thompson and Ms. James’s yearslong use of the house and Ms. Thompson’s testimony to the grand jury — neither of which has been previously reported — illuminate the straightforward factual dispute that will animate the case. Real estate and legal experts said that it would be difficult to assess the strength of Ms. Halligan’s case until more facts were presented in court.Editors’ PicksAfter a Crisis, ‘a Miracle’ Gave Them a Second Chance in BerkeleyWhy Can’t Fashion See What It Does to Women?In This Pageant, the Ugliest Face Wins

But the burden of proof is high. If the case makes it to trial, the charges, one of bank fraud and one of false statements to a financial institution, will require prosecutors to convince a jury that Ms. James intentionally misled the mortgage broker, OVM Financial, and First Savings Bank, which, according to the indictment, acquired the loan in 2021.

Ms. Thompson’s testimony that she has lived in the house rent-free — Ms. James pays even for basic upkeep, the people said — could make it difficult for prosecutors to convince a jury that the house was meant to be used as a rental investment property.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

“The question is, what is the proof and what are the facts,” said Stuart Slotnick, a former prosecutor who heads the New York City office of Buchanan, Ingersoll and Rooney, concentrating in part on real estate litigation. “James is claiming that she was singled out,” he said. “And at the same time, this indictment can be legally sufficient. They’re not mutually exclusive and they can both be true.”

The case will ride in part on the legal definition of real estate terms — in particular, distinctions in what Fannie Mae, the government enterprise that backs the mortgage market, refers to as occupancy types. In 2020, the year the house was purchased, Fannie Mae noted in its guide to the market that a second home must be occupied by a borrower “for some portion of the year,” and “must not be a rental property or a timeshare agreement.”

That is where Ms. James’s regular visits to the property to see her grandniece and other family, including Ms. Thompson’s mother, who also lives in a Norfolk home Ms. James owns, may be useful to the attorney general’s defense team.

An investment property, by contrast, is owned, but not occupied, by the borrower. A “rental investment property” is not a specific occupancy type, and, in its glossary, the Fannie Mae guide from 2020 does not define the term “rent” or “rental.”

Mortgages on investment properties often carry higher interest rates because they are inherently riskier; the owner’s expectations of regular rent could be upended by a shifting market or an unreliable tenant.

Under the terms of a document that amended Ms. James’s mortgage agreement, she was expected to use the Norfolk property as a second home, with the exception of occasional, short-term rentals, according to the documents and to real-estate experts who analyzed them for the Times.ImageCars along a road in Norfolk, Va.The quiet Norfolk neighborhood that includes the yellow house is at the center of a noisy national battle.Credit...Kristen Zeis for The New York Times

Beginning 12 months after the deed was signed, Ms. James had wider latitude to use the property as she wished, according to the document and the experts. “After a year, people’s circumstances change,” said Clifford Rossi, a University of Maryland finance professor who once oversaw risk management for Citi’s consumer lending practice.

That caveat raises questions about when exactly prosecutors believe that Ms. James used the property as a rental. The indictment does not include those dates.

Mr. Rossi said that during his years at Citi, he saw cases in which a parent allowed an adult child to live in a second home rent-free — prompting the bank to consider pursuing the matter in court as a violation of the original borrower agreement. Citi’s lawyers, he recalled, often advised against doing so.

“We were told by counsel basically to stand down, that it would be very difficult to prove that out in a court of law, because there’s a lot of gray in these cases,” he said.

Mr. Rossi said that at times, tax documents would reveal that a borrower had been collecting rent despite classifying a property as a second home. That would be a red flag, he said, to see if the borrower had misled the lender. “It would warrant further scrutiny,” he said.

The indictment suggests that Ms. James collected at least some rental income, saying that she filed a tax form where she reported “thousand(s) of dollars of rents received.” It does not say in what year those forms were filed.

On New York State annual financial disclosures that Ms. James is required to file as attorney general, she has only once listed rental income associated with the Norfolk house. In 2020, she said that she had made between $1,000 and $5,000 in income from it. In the following years, she did not list any income from the house.

She did, however, list the house as an “investment property” from the year she bought it until the disclosure she made this year, once she was already under investigation.

On Friday morning, children’s toys were scattered across the front porch of the house. A woman answered the doorbell intercom: “No comment,” she said, before curtly noting a no-trespassing sign.

A neighbor, Jacob Neufeldt, a Navy sailor who said he had lived next to the house for several years, was more forthcoming.

Mr. Neufeldt said he hadn’t had much contact with Ms. Thompson in the last month, though he knew her well enough to refer to her by her first name. He expressed astonishment that the drama unfolding in New York and Washington all sprang from a two-story colonial on his quiet, neighborhood block.

Oct. 10  

 

New York Times, James Indictment Mirrors Her Civil Case Against Trump in Miniature, Jonah E. Bromwich and Devlin Barrett, Oct. 10, 2025. The president and New York’s attorney general accused each other of real estate fraud. But the sum involved in her case is $18,933, while millions were at stake in his.

It has long been President Trump’s impulse to tar his enemies with the same accusations they have lobbed at him.

And his Justice Department’s criminal case against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, above, carries echoes of the civil fraud case she brought against him — albeit at a scale so small that most federal prosecutors would never deign to pursue it.

The indictment, less than a month after Mr. Trump publicly exhorted the Justice Department to pursue Ms. James, accuses her of violating a mortgage agreement on a Virginia house she purchased in 2020 by using it as a rental property.

The case is a fresh reminder of how the president has taken the Justice Department in hand and directed its prosecutorial powers toward his adversaries. Ms. James is the second of his enemies to be indicted in the past two weeks after he insisted that a case be pursued. Just five days before the charges against Ms. James were handed up, he called her “corrupt” and “scum” on his social media platform and said she should be removed from the New York attorney general’s office.

The indictment charges Ms. James with one count apiece of bank fraud and false statements to financial institutions and says that by misrepresenting her intentions for the house, she received favorable terms that would have allowed her to save $18,933 over the life of the loan.

A federal case concerning such a small sum would be highly unusual even absent the politics shadowing the charges against Ms. James, and the indictment’s factual claims are likely to be disputed. A person familiar with Ms. James’s housing arrangements said that the property had never been used as a rental and was occupied by Ms. James’s family members. There was no rental agreement and Ms. James has continued to pay the mortgage, said the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Ms. James is set to appear in a Virginia court on Oct. 24. It is likely that she will seek to persuade a judge to dismiss the charges before a trial, arguing that they stem from a vindictive and selective prosecution. But the stakes are high — if convicted, Ms. James faces the possibility decades in prison.

In a statement, a lawyer for Ms. James, Abbe D. Lowell, said that Ms. James “flatly and forcefully denies these charges.”

“We are deeply concerned that this case is driven by President Trump’s desire for revenge,” he wrote. “When a president can publicly direct charges to be filed against someone — when it was reported that career attorneys concluded none were warranted — it marks a serious attack on the rule of law.”

The immediate circumstances surrounding the indictment of Ms. James on Thursday were unusual in several respects.

The case, which was brought in the Eastern District of Virginia, is expected to proceed in Norfolk, but was presented before a grand jury in Alexandria, just outside Washington, D.C.

Like the Trump Justice Department’s case against the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, another nemesis of the president, it was brought by Lindsey Halligan, above, a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump with no prior experience as a prosecutor. The president pushed out Ms. Halligan’s predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, for expressing skepticism about cases against Ms. James and Mr. Comey.

Also like the Comey case, Ms. Halligan was the only prosecutor whose name appeared on the indictment. In most cases, the rank and file prosecutors who handled the investigation sign the court filings.

In recent weeks, career prosecutors in the Norfolk division of the U.S. attorney’s office had looked at the evidence against Ms. James and believed it did not merit criminal charges, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing case. A senior prosecutor in that division relayed that determination to her superiors, according to the people.

Despite that, Ms. Halligan chose to proceed.

As Ms. James knows firsthand, even civil fraud cases, which have a lower burden of proof than criminal cases, can be difficult to win. Though she initially triumphed in the civil fraud trial of Mr. Trump, which was overseen by a New York judge, a state appellate court recently threw out the half-billion dollar penalty. The appeals panel reached a shaky agreement to uphold the finding that Mr. Trump was liable for fraud, but only so that the entire case could be evaluated by the state’s highest court.

Still, Mr. Trump was humiliated by Ms. James’s lawsuit and the subsequent trial, which took aim at one of his most prized assets: his public image as a self-made billionaire. Ms. James accused him of a yearslong pattern of exaggerating his net worth on annual financial statements in order to receive favorable loan terms from banks and insurers.

Her case was years in the making. When Ms. James ran to be New York attorney general in 2018, she pledged to investigate Mr. Trump and his family business. One of her refrains was “No one is above the law.”

She was elected and, the following year, opened an inquiry into Mr. Trump predicated on congressional testimony from his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen.

In 2022, Ms. James sued Mr. Trump, accusing him of inflating his net worth by billions of dollars, and the following year, she took him to trial, where the value of individual properties in his empire — many of them worth multiples of what Ms. James is accused of retaining in ill-gotten gains — was closely scrutinized.

Both Ms. James and Mr. Trump attended the trial regularly, sitting just feet from one another.

Mr. Trump pledged revenge before the case even reached a conclusion. In January 2024, he took over the microphone during the fraud trial’s closing arguments and fumed at Ms. James directly, saying that her case was in fact “a fraud on me.” Ms. James, he said, “should pay me for what we had to go through.”

The following year, in April, Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, initiated the case against Ms. James. He sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department suggesting that the New York attorney general “appeared to have falsified records” and indicated that she might have committed mortgage fraud.

Mr. Pulte has since targeted other enemies of Mr. Trump with similar allegations. But the accusations against Ms. James are the first to make their way into an indictment.

Mr. Pulte celebrated on Thursday evening, promoting a social media post that said, “Bill Pulte doesn’t play. They all thought their mortgage scams were safe. They were wrong. This is just the beginning.”

Ms. Halligan, the U.S. attorney who secured the indictment, issued her own statement. It began with a familiar phrase: “No one is above the law.”

 

The Bulwark, Opinion: One Size Fits All, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 10, 2025. One of the most insidious things about Donald Trump’s decade-long turn atop our politics is the way it has seared our political conscience. For years, it has been a cliché to call his various awful behaviors and decisions “shocking, but not surprising.” These days, however, we seem to be losing some of our inability even to feel the shock.

You could see this in some of the early reactions last night to the news of Letitia James’s indictment on two counts of mortgage fraud.

The New York attorney general has been near the top of Trump’s enemies list for a while, and literally nobody—at least that I can dig up—seems to be trying to argue that this indictment isn’t an act of naked political retribution. (To be fair, arguing this would be difficult after Trump removed all doubt last month by accidentally putting a post out in public that he had meant to send as a DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding James’s prosecution.)

Instead, the Republican line—parroted by some who should really know better—is that this is a justified act of retribution, in some sort of street-justice sense. Or if not justified, at least understandable, from Trump’s point of view: They tried to get him, now he’s trying to get them. Most charitably, they say, it is an unfortunate tit-for-tat that can’t go on indefinitely—but also a situation in which Trump is just one bad actor in a cast of many.

An editorial from the new-look, more Trump-forgiving Washington Post editorial board this week cast the current moment along those lines. “Many Democrats still cannot see how their legal aggression against Trump during his four years out of power set the stage for the dangerous revenge tour on which he is now embarked,” it mourned. Those who were trying to hold Trump accountable had “show[n] little restraint” in their investigations—a big part of why he was now “showing still less restraint” while hitting back. It’s unfortunate that he lashed out at you like that—but maybe you shouldn’t have made him so mad.

We should be clear about this. There is no comparison between the acts Letitia James took as attorney general of New York to hit Trump’s companies and the ones he is now taking to hit “back” at her. The difference between them is not the difference between a lesser act of political malice and a greater one. (Although it is worth noting the massive difference of scale here: While James’s civil suit accused Trump’s companies of pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars off a years-long practice of misrepresenting properties, the indictment against James accuses her of filing a misleading loan application and coming out ahead less than $20,000.) It’s the difference between the application of law and the application of raw power.

When people accuse James of “lawfare,” or of pursuing a “politicized” civil fraud case against Trump, they mean that she pursued that case with a zeal they believe she would not have shown against another target. Could be! But her fundamental case, as the New York Times noted last month, was not unreasonable. It was rooted in sworn testimony Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, right, had made before Congress that Trump habitually inflated the value of his properties to get favorable treatment in loans.

She won her civil case against Trump at trial. This year, an appeals court vacated the financial penalty the initial judge had handed down, but did not vacate Trump’s civil liability. Trump had his day to argue in court that James’s investigations into him were vindictive and politically motivated—and the courts threw that argument out.

Now consider Trump. As he staffed out his administration with lickspittles and cronies, he didn’t just instruct them to look into James to see what they could rustle up. Instead, he twisted the entire federal government into a shape designed to produce the criminal indictment he demanded.

The roots of the mortgage-fraud claim into James weren’t anything he came by honestly: They were the results of a fishing expedition carried out by Bill Pulte, who has used the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which he directs, as a databank to plumb for information on a host of Trump enemies. When that pretext didn’t prove compelling enough to the first Trump-appointed U.S. prosecutor with jurisdiction, the president canned that prosecutor and moved on to someone he was sure would give him the result he wanted: his former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan. Halligan, sure enough, has now done so.

Just how unjust a campaign of retribution this will turn out to be remains to be seen. It’s possible, of course, that Pulte’s muckraking turned up actual wrongdoing on James’s part—though James vigorously denies this and Halligan’s non-compromised predecessor seemed to agree. We’ll get to find out, as James will still geta trial—no matter how much Trump, who already says he knows her to be “guilty as hell,” might want to skip ahead.

Still, it’s important to be lucid about where we are. This isn’t Trump escalating a fight James started. It’s Trump being Trump the only way he knows how: smashing, smashing, and smashing until the last irritating opponent is gone from his sight.

Civil Discourse, What You Need To Know About The Tish James Indictment, Joyce Vance, right, Oct. 10, 2025. A recording from Joyce Vance and Preet Bharara's live video.

This morning, my former U.S. Attorney colleague, and current podcast co-host, Preet Bharara, and I dug into the federal indictment of New York Attorney General Tish James. It’s five pages long and you can read it here. James is charged, in a barebones indictment, with bank fraud and making false statements.

James’ indictment had long been rumored. The expectation was that it would involve a second home she had purchased. But when the indictment came, it was a different house and a different allegation. Preet and I explain the details and outline the weaknesses of the indictment in our chat, which you can watch above or click to review the transcript. 

The Bulwark, Opinion: One Size Fits All, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 10, 2025. One of the most insidious things about Donald Trump’s decade-long turn atop our politics is the way it has seared our political conscience. For years, it has been a cliché to call his various awful behaviors and decisions “shocking, but not surprising.” These days, however, we seem to be losing some of our inability even to feel the shock.

You could see this in some of the early reactions last night to the news of Letitia James’s indictment on two counts of mortgage fraud.

The New York attorney general has been near the top of Trump’s enemies list for a while, and literally nobody—at least that I can dig up—seems to be trying to argue that this indictment isn’t an act of naked political retribution. (To be fair, arguing this would be difficult after Trump removed all doubt last month by accidentally putting a post out in public that he had meant to send as a DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding James’s prosecution.)

Instead, the Republican line—parroted by some who should really know better—is that this is a justified act of retribution, in some sort of street-justice sense. Or if not justified, at least understandable, from Trump’s point of view: They tried to get him, now he’s trying to get them. Most charitably, they say, it is an unfortunate tit-for-tat that can’t go on indefinitely—but also a situation in which Trump is just one bad actor in a cast of many.

An editorial from the new-look, more Trump-forgiving Washington Post editorial board this week cast the current moment along those lines. “Many Democrats still cannot see how their legal aggression against Trump during his four years out of power set the stage for the dangerous revenge tour on which he is now embarked,” it mourned. Those who were trying to hold Trump accountable had “show[n] little restraint” in their investigations—a big part of why he was now “showing still less restraint” while hitting back. It’s unfortunate that he lashed out at you like that—but maybe you shouldn’t have made him so mad.

We should be clear about this. There is no comparison between the acts Letitia James took as attorney general of New York to hit Trump’s companies and the ones he is now taking to hit “back” at her. The difference between them is not the difference between a lesser act of political malice and a greater one. (Although it is worth noting the massive difference of scale here: While James’s civil suit accused Trump’s companies of pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars off a years-long practice of misrepresenting properties, the indictment against James accuses her of filing a misleading loan application and coming out ahead less than $20,000.) It’s the difference between the application of law and the application of raw power.

When people accuse James of “lawfare,” or of pursuing a “politicized” civil fraud case against Trump, they mean that she pursued that case with a zeal they believe she would not have shown against another target. Could be! But her fundamental case, as the New York Times noted last month, was not unreasonable. It was rooted in sworn testimony Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, right, had made before Congress that Trump habitually inflated the value of his properties to get favorable treatment in loans.

She won her civil case against Trump at trial. This year, an appeals court vacated the financial penalty the initial judge had handed down, but did not vacate Trump’s civil liability. Trump had his day to argue in court that James’s investigations into him were vindictive and politically motivated—and the courts threw that argument out.

Now consider Trump. As he staffed out his administration with lickspittles and cronies, he didn’t just instruct them to look into James to see what they could rustle up. Instead, he twisted the entire federal government into a shape designed to produce the criminal indictment he demanded.

The roots of the mortgage-fraud claim into James weren’t anything he came by honestly: They were the results of a fishing expedition carried out by Bill Pulte, who has used the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which he directs, as a databank to plumb for information on a host of Trump enemies. When that pretext didn’t prove compelling enough to the first Trump-appointed U.S. prosecutor with jurisdiction, the president canned that prosecutor and moved on to someone he was sure would give him the result he wanted: his former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan. Halligan, sure enough, has now done so.

Just how unjust a campaign of retribution this will turn out to be remains to be seen. It’s possible, of course, that Pulte’s muckraking turned up actual wrongdoing on James’s part—though James vigorously denies this and Halligan’s non-compromised predecessor seemed to agree. We’ll get to find out, as James will still geta trial—no matter how much Trump, who already says he knows her to be “guilty as hell,” might want to skip ahead.

Still, it’s important to be lucid about where we are. This isn’t Trump escalating a fight James started. It’s Trump being Trump the only way he knows how: smashing, smashing, and smashing until the last irritating opponent is gone from his sight.

Oct. 9 

Emptywheel, Analysis: Next Up, Tish James, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 9, 2025. Tish James was indicted on two counts by Trump's personal lawyer.

The indictment of Tish James on bank fraud and lying to a financial institution is here. Once again, Lindsey Halligan alone signed it.

Her video statement, which focuses on Trump’s fraud, is very good.

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy, AG Letitia James' Powerful Response To Trump: "I am not fearful - I am fearless," Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 9, 2025. Late this afternoon the Trump regime indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James (NYT gift link). I don’t often send two emails in a day but her video response was so powerful that I wanted to make sure everyone got to see it. It is above.

Here is what I posted on Bluesky, a sentiment that builds on my recent post, Every Democrat Must Now Join The Fight Again Trump’s Escalating, Dangerous, Traiterous Authoritarianism: Note how aggressive Leader Schumer’s statement was this afternoon: "This is what tyranny looks like. President Trump is using the Justice Department as his personal attack dog, targeting Attorney General Tish James for the ‘crime’ of prosecuting him for fraud—and winning."

One U.S. Attorney already refused this case. So, Trump hand-picked an unqualified hack that would go after another political enemy. This isn’t justice. It’s revenge. And it should horrify every American who believes no one is above the law.