Lindsey Halligan, President Donald Trump’s hatchet person in the Eastern District of Virginia, has come up with a genius plan to deal with James Comey’s upcoming motion challenging her appointment: filing a motion that Comey’s lead attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, has a conflict of interest and should be disqualified.
LOL. LMAO, even.
Halligan’s theory is that Comey used Fitzgerald to improperly disclose classified information after Trump fired him in 2017. To bolster this, the motion relies on a 2019 report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, which concludes that Comey “failed to live up to this responsibility” to “protect sensitive law enforcement information.”
Former FBI Director James Comey
But one little problem with this genius plan is that the same report also said that it “found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the Memos to members of the media.”
Also, fun little fact, the OIG said that, upon completing its investigation, it provided a copy of its findings to the DOJ to make a decision on whether to prosecute Comey and “after reviewing the matter, the Department declined prosecution.”
Whoopsie! That selective quoting will get you every time, Lindsey!
Now, Comey did indeed share several memoranda with Fitzgerald back in 2017 when he sought legal advice about his termination, but they were unclassified. The government tried to “up-classify” those memos late, to jam up Comey, but a later up-classification doesn’t magically reach back in time to make it illegal to have shared something unclassified.
The problem for Halligan is that, even if she managed to somehow knock out Fitzgerald, Comey has a trial team—not a single attorney—and this thing is stacked.
The court just granted Comey’s pro hac vice request to allow Rebekah Donaleski, who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and was chief of the public corruption unit, to represent him in Virginia.
Parties have to ask courts for permission to have attorneys not barred in that jurisdiction to represent them, so Comey also has to request to add Elias Kim, who worked for the solicitor general and helped brief and prepare more than a dozen Supreme Court cases. Oh, and Ephraim McDowell, who also worked for the solicitor general, where he handled roughly 80 Supreme Court cases, including arguing five of them.
Lindsey Halligan speaks with reporters at the White House in August.
And in a move sure to make Trump incandescent with rage, Comey also asked to admit Michael Dreeben, whose credentials are as top-notch as all of Comey’s other lawyers, having spent 31 years in the Office of the Solicitor General, including being deputy solicitor general in charge of the DOJ’s criminal docket for 26 of those. But the rage-inducing part is that he worked with Robert Mueller on the Russian election interference investigation in 2017.
While Comey seems to have every former federal prosecutor and assistant solicitor general on speed dial, Halligan has two dudes from North Carolina because none of the prosecutors in her office would touch this thing. She also continues to purge her office of actual prosecutors with actual experience—because how dare they have pesky opinions like “you shouldn’t bring charges against someone who committed no crimes”?
If Comey succeeds in removing Halligan for being unlawfully appointed, it’s not at all clear who could helm this prosecution. There has to be someone legally in the U.S. attorney role in that district, but the attorneys who will do Trump’s bidding are not people who the Senate will confirm.
Ultimately, the problem is that only unqualified and morally compromised people like Halligan want to do Trump’s dirty work. But on the other side of these sham prosecutions, legal superstars are lining up for the defendants.
Good luck, Lindsey. You’ll need it.
