A remarkable ruling in James Comey’s case shows yet another way that the prosecution against the former FBI director could unravel — separate from the pending questions of whether Lindsey Halligan was lawfully appointed and whether the case she brought is unconstitutionally vindictive.
Ordering the rare disclosure of grand jury materials to the defense, U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick concluded that the record in the case “points to a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.”
Fitzpatrick’s 24-page opinion on Monday paints a damning picture on several fronts of the effort overseen by Halligan, the Trump-installed prosecutor who hadn’t previously prosecuted a case and brought this one over the objection of career prosecutors.
After reviewing the grand jury materials himself, Fitzpatrick wrote that Halligan appeared to make two “fundamental misstatements of the law that could compromise the integrity of the grand jury process.” The specific statements are redacted in the opinion, but the judge noted that they gave grand jurors the wrong impression about Comey’s legal rights.
Comey pleaded not guilty to charges of lying to Congress and obstructing Congress in connection with his 2020 Senate testimony.
In his ruling, Fitzpatrick also criticized what he called the government’s “cavalier attitude towards a basic tenet of the Fourth Amendment and multiple court orders” in how it went about building and presenting the case that led to Comey’s indictment.
“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 judge wrote.
Elsewhere, he wrote that the “unusual series of events” overseen by Halligan “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.”
The ruling follows several early stumbles by Halligan, a former personal lawyer to Donald Trump. Beyond this case, it’s the latest example of judges realizing that they can’t give the Justice Department the benefit of the doubt in Trump’s second presidential term.
While the ruling shows multiple areas that could lead to the case’s dismissal pretrial, the opinion doesn’t go so far as to order dismissal at this early stage. Rather, it takes the preliminary — though, as the judge conceded, extraordinary — step of giving Comey’s defense team “all grand jury materials filed on the docket under seal by the government” and “the complete audio recording of the grand jury proceedings.” After reviewing those materials, Comey’s lawyers will then likely use them to make further motions to dismiss based on the contents of those materials. The judge noted in his opinion that the materials “are not being made public, at least not yet,” but instead are going to Comey’s team under a protective order. Though the ruling doesn’t dismiss the case, it represents the latest serious cause for concern for Halligan — if, in fact, she wants this case to get to trial, where it would face its own problems of proving the charges beyond a reasonable doubt. 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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