Now that a federal magistrate judge found nearly a dozen potential defects in the grand jury proceedings in James Comey’s case, the fallout could extend beyond Lindsey Halligan, the former Donald Trump lawyer turned first-time prosecutor who brought the case.
Former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner unpacked what those might be in a Substack Live that aired earlier today.
Attorney General Pam Bondi ratified Halligan’s actions multiple times, even backing statements that U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick didn’t find credible.
Given Halligan’s inexperience, some observers might view Bondi as the more culpable party.
“If you put somebody who is utterly incompetent out there to do something that is beyond their capability, the question of whether it’s intentional that they screwed up or an accident becomes not important,” Epner noted. “If you asked an auto mechanic to perform brain surgery, the fact that they screwed up isn’t on the auto mechanic. It’s on the person who put them in that position.”
Halligan, a former lawyer for insurance companies, has no prosecutorial experience. Bondi installed her as the Eastern District of Virginia’s top prosecutor after Trump pressured out Halligan’s predecessor Erik Siebert, who didn’t believe the cases against Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were warranted. Halligan pursued it over the objections of every career prosecutor in her district.
In the full video at the top of this newsletter, Epner and I discuss the potential consequences for the future of this case — and professional consequences for those who pushed it.
Could Halligan and Bondi follow in the footsteps of Rudy Giuliani, Ken Chesebro, and other lawyers who took part in Trump’s 2020 election subversion efforts and faced discipline or disbarment?
Epner answers: “Well, the difference is that Ken Chesebro is and was a brilliant attorney. He spent decades as sort of the research assistant/colleague of Professor Tribe of Harvard Law School. Rudy Giuliani at one time was a brilliant lawyer. Those days have long since passed, but he really was an eminent practitioner at some point.”
Pivoting to Halligan and Bondi, Epner added: “These are not those sorts of legal minds.”
Stay tuned to All Rise News for more live coverage of Comey’s case on Wednesday, the date of his next court appearance.
