Donald Trump’s handpicked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, tried to fix a damaging courtroom admission in the James Comey case, and instead may have blown a hole straight through her own indictment, according to one legal analyst.
Halligan, a former personal lawyer for Trump who was elevated to interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, is already under scrutiny over her handling of the criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey.
Comey is charged with making false statements and obstructing Congress over his 2020 Senate testimony about the FBI’s Russia investigation. He has pleaded not guilty and accused the Justice Department of carrying out Trump’s vendetta.
The trouble started when Halligan’s own team admitted that the final two count indictment against Comey was never actually shown to the full grand jury.
The judge pressed the government on the point, asking whether the operative indictment “is a document that was never shown to the entire grand jury or presented in the grand jury room.” A prosecutor ultimately replied, “Yes, that is my understanding,” a moment that stunned court watchers and emboldened Comey’s defense team.
Within a day, the Justice Department tried to walk that back. In a new filing, prosecutors insisted that an “official transcript” from a prior proceeding showed that the grand jury had in fact voted on and “true billed” the indictment, casting the earlier courtroom admission as a misunderstanding.
That is where Halligan’s attempted fix, in the view of Legal AF host and national trial lawyer Michael Popok, turned into an even bigger problem. Popok said the new filing “didn’t help matters. It actually made it worse.” He explained, “This is the new filing that they made after they screwed up in court and had their lawyer admit to the judge that the grand jury never saw the actual document called the second indictment, with just two counts in it… no, the seven minutes of transcript don’t help you; they actually hang you.”
According to Popok, the prosecutors’ decision to submit selected pages from the grand jury transcript now opens the door for Comey’s team to demand the full record. The podcast episode’s description puts it even more bluntly, noting that Halligan’s office “just screwed up again” by filing a transcript that “hurts not helps” their effort to preserve the indictment, while also waiving any argument that the defense should be denied the complete grand jury materials.
Popok also argued that the filing “shows that not only is Halligan hopelessly confused, including at the last hearing, but that she is in big trouble with the judge deciding whether she should be fired as US Attorney, too.”
A magistrate judge has already pointed out significant investigative mistakes and ordered the grand jury materials to be given to the defense. This is an unusual step that the Justice Department is challenging in an appeal. By choosing to submit only a portion of the transcript to support their indictment, prosecutors risk persuading the court that secrecy has already been broken and that fairness now calls for complete disclosure.
Comey’s lawyers have long argued that the prosecution represents an “egregious abuse of power” driven by Trump’s public demands to target his enemies while similar alleged conduct by Trump allies went uncharged. Now they have fresh ammunition to argue that the case is not only politically tainted but procedurally defective at its core.
