Rising This Week: Comey's counteroffensive

James Comey and Letitia James return to federal court in Virginia to try to disqualify Lindsey Halligan.

Lindsey Halligan and James Comey (Photos by Al Drago and Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images)

Firsthand reporting, informed analysis, passionate about the stakes.

The first phase of former FBI director James Comey’s and New York Attorney General Letitia James’s bid to throw out their Trump-ordered prosecutions comes to a head this week on Thursday.

Inside a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., a federal judge will hear arguments in their joint motion to disqualify Lindsey Halligan as the Eastern District of Virginia’s new top prosecutor. If she does disqualify Halligan, the judge then must decide whether to dismiss their indictments.

U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie, a Bill Clinton appointee, is sitting by designation from the District of South Carolina to avoid any conflict of interest among the judges of the district where Halligan is bringing her cases. Currie demanded a full transcript of the grand jury materials before Thursday’s hearing. The judge’s interest in that information could be a tell.

Federal judges in other districts didn’t request to inspect grand jury materials before finding other Trump-installed Acting U.S. Attorneys Alina Habba, Sigal Chattah, and Bilal “Bill” Essayli were unlawfully appointed. In those cases, however, the federal judges refused to throw out the underlying indictments. Comey and James say that Halligan’s short tenure in the Eastern District of Virginia has infected their cases so completely that the allegations against them are inseparable from the rookie prosecutor.

Halligan was the only person in the grand jury room in both cases — for the first and second times of her life. Trump forced Halligan’s predecessor Eric Siebert to resign because of his refusal to bring the case against James, which other career prosecutors in his office found were unsupported.

U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick, who’s in charge of pre-trial proceedings in Comey’s case, also demanded a copy of the grand jury transcript. Prosecutors want to prevent its disclosure to Comey’s defense team, and there will be a separate hearing on that issue on Monday.

With trial dates scheduled for January, the cases against James and Comey are moving quickly in the Eastern District of Virginia, known for its “rocket docket.”

In New Jersey, another politically charged criminal case originally expected to head to trial this week has been postponed indefinitely to allow a federal judge to decide questions of vindictive prosecution.

In May, Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) visited the Delaney Hall immigration detention facility as part of her congressional oversight duties, when federal agents started to arrest Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. In the ensuing melee, agents swarmed around McIver and her congressional delegation. The case against Baraka collapsed, but prosecutors accused McIver of assaulting law enforcement.

For now, the charge still stands, but McIver’s multipronged effort to dismiss the case before trial was serious enough for U.S. District Judge Jamel K. Semper to postpone her trial indefinitely. Like James and Comey, McIver says she’s been targeted for a selective, vindictive and politically motivated prosecution that also violates her congressional immunity.

If McIver wins, it will be another humiliation for Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba, whose appointment as an Acting U.S. Attorney was ruled to be illegal. (Since Habba brought the case against McIver before the lawful period of her temporary term expired, McIver isn’t challenging her prosecution on that basis.)

All told, it’s a fateful week for the prosecutions of Trump’s political targets.

Being there

There’s no substitute for live coverage.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing number of courts have allowed the public to remotely access hearings through YouTube pages and public telephone lines, but it’s still not the norm. That means that the only way to observe some of the most significant court proceedings of our time, in the words of the late, great novelist Jerzy Kosinski, is being there.

When making the decision to go independent, I resolved to cover the biggest cases of the day on the ground. That’s because some of the most important stories involving the preservation of U.S. democracy are happening in the courts.

Through the support of All Rise News subscribers, I have been able to follow through on that ambition, and I will be reporting the start of James and Comey’s counteroffensive against Halligan this week by traveling to Alexandria, Va.

If you have the ability, becoming a paid subscriber helps sustain and expand this coverage. There will be no shortage of commentary about Halligan’s disqualification hearing this week. Support journalism informed by firsthand observations and invest in uncovering the facts on the ground.

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Below the paywall:

* Court listings

* “Veterans Say No” to military occupations on Tuesday

* Mass actions against SNAP suspensions