Comey grand jury never saw final indictment

What happened

U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff on Wednesday grilled federal prosecutors on irregularities in their indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, forcing acting U.S Attorney Lindsey Halligan to acknowledge she had not shown the full grand jury the final indictment it was supposed to have approved. Another prosecutor, Tyler Lemons, revealed under questioning that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s office had told him not to discuss a memo by his predecessors explaining why they declined to charge Comey.

Who said what

Yesterday’s “extraordinary” revelations emerged during an “excruciatingly awkward hearing” that “drove home just how slapdash” the Comey prosecution “appeared to have been from its inception,” The New York Times said. Nachmanoff seemed “stunned” at how Halligan, an insurance lawyer with no former prosecutorial experience, appeared to have bungled the grand jury process.

Lemons argued that the final indictment was just the two charges the grand jurors had already approved minus one they rejected, so “the new indictment wasn’t a new indictment.” If Halligan did not present the final version to the grand jury, “there is no indictment,” Comey lawyer Michael Dreeben countered. And since the statute of limitations on the alleged perjury ran out on Sept. 30, that “would be tantamount to a bar of further prosecution in this case.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What next?

Nachmanoff declined to issue an immediate decision yesterday, saying the “issues are too weighty and too complex.” But his “intense focus” on the indictment’s validity, Politico said, “suggested he may view it as critical and, perhaps, fatal to the government’s case,” which “appears to be on increasingly flimsy ground” across several courtrooms.