A federal judge has rejected another early motion from the Justice Department in James Comey’s criminal case. As was true of a ruling siding with the former FBI director last week, this latest decision also questions the approach taken by the Lindsey Halligan-led DOJ team.
While last week’s order said Halligan’s discovery proposal would cause needless delay, Monday’s order from U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff rejected the DOJ’s request for an expedited ruling on how potentially sensitive evidence is processed through what is known as a filter protocol.
Halligan (who lacks prior prosecutorial experience) and her team (two DOJ prosecutors from North Carolina) made the motion to expedite the day before Comey’s first two big motions were due Monday. In those motions, he is seeking to dismiss the case based on what he says is the unlawfulness of Halligan’s appointment in Virginia and the selective and vindictive nature of his prosecution. The DOJ will respond to those next month.
The prosecution’s failed motion sought a speedy ruling on the government’s proposed implementation of a filter protocol, which the DOJ said is needed quickly to “avoid potential delay.” It said the evidence for filter review “could also inform a potential conflict and disqualification issue for the current lead defense counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald.”
Rejecting the expedition request on Monday, Nachmanoff suggested that any undue delay was the government’s fault.
Opposing the motion, Fitzgerald and the rest of Comey’s defense team said the effort to “defame lead defense counsel provides no basis to grant the motion.” They said the DOJ’s claim that the defendant used Fitzgerald “‘to improperly disclose classified information,’” and the implication that Fitzgerald and Comey engaged in criminal activity by doing so, “is provably false and in any event provides no basis to grant the motion to expedite.”
Rejecting the expedition request on Monday, Nachmanoff suggested that any undue delay was the government’s fault. The judge noted that the DOJ failed to ask for a speedy ruling when it filed its initial filter motion on Oct. 13. In a footnote, the Biden appointee wrote that the DOJ “has had the materials at issue in its possession for several years and apparently failed to seek any guidance with respect to a filter protocol at any time before October 13, 2025.” He added that the report forming the basis for the DOJ’s claim about Fitzgerald was public knowledge since its 2019 publication. “And yet, the government failed to raise any concern with lead counsel’s representation until the filing of the government’s motion to expedite on October 19, 2025,” he wrote. While this is only a ruling on a preliminary issue in a case in which the litigation is just getting started, and there are much bigger rulings to come (including on Comey’s motions to dismiss), the judge has not been persuaded so far by Halligan’s approach. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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