Lindsey Halligan, President Donald Trump’s hatchet individual within the Jap District of Virginia, has provide you with a genius plan to take care of James Comey’s upcoming movement difficult her appointment: submitting a movement that Comey’s lead legal professional, Patrick Fitzgerald, has a battle of curiosity and must be disqualified.
LOL. LMAO, even.
Halligan’s principle is that Comey used Fitzgerald to improperly disclose categorised data after Trump fired him in 2017. To bolster this, the movement depends on a 2019 report from the Justice Division’s Workplace of the Inspector Basic, which concludes that Comey “failed to live up to this responsibility” to “protect sensitive law enforcement information.”
Former FBI Director James Comey
However one little drawback with this genius plan is that the identical report additionally mentioned that it “found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the Memos to members of the media.”
Additionally, enjoyable little reality, the OIG mentioned that, upon finishing its investigation, it offered a replica of its findings to the DOJ to decide on whether or not to prosecute Comey and “after reviewing the matter, the Department declined prosecution.”
Whoopsie! That selective quoting will get you each time, Lindsey!
Now, Comey did certainly share a number of memoranda with Fitzgerald again in 2017 when he sought authorized recommendation about his termination, however they had been unclassified. The federal government tried to “up-classify” these memos late, to jam up Comey, however a later up-classification doesn’t magically attain again in time to make it unlawful to have shared one thing unclassified.
The issue for Halligan is that, even when she managed to one way or the other knock out Fitzgerald, Comey has a trial crew—not a single legal professional—and this factor is stacked.
The court docket simply granted Comey’s professional hac vice request to permit Rebekah Donaleski, who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor within the Southern District of New York and was chief of the general public corruption unit, to characterize him in Virginia.
Events should ask courts for permission to have attorneys not barred in that jurisdiction to characterize them, so Comey additionally has to request so as to add Elias Kim, who labored for the solicitor normal and helped transient and put together greater than a dozen Supreme Court docket instances. Oh, and Ephraim McDowell, who additionally labored for the solicitor normal, the place he dealt with roughly 80 Supreme Court docket instances, together with arguing 5 of them.
Lindsey Halligan speaks with reporters on the White Home in August.
And in a transfer certain to make Trump incandescent with rage, Comey additionally requested to confess Michael Dreeben, whose credentials are as top-notch as all of Comey’s different attorneys, having spent 31 years within the Workplace of the Solicitor Basic, together with being deputy solicitor normal in command of the DOJ’s felony docket for 26 of these. However the rage-inducing half is that he labored with Robert Mueller on the Russian election interference investigation in 2017.
Whereas Comey appears to have each former federal prosecutor and assistant solicitor normal on velocity dial, Halligan has two dudes from North Carolina as a result of not one of the prosecutors in her workplace would contact this factor. She additionally continues to purge her workplace of precise prosecutors with precise expertise—as a result of how dare they’ve pesky opinions like “you shouldn’t bring charges against someone who committed no crimes”?
If Comey succeeds in eradicating Halligan for being unlawfully appointed, it’s under no circumstances clear who may helm this prosecution. There must be somebody legally within the U.S. legal professional position in that district, however the attorneys who will do Trump’s bidding will not be individuals who the Senate will affirm.
Finally, the issue is that solely unqualified and morally compromised folks like Halligan need to do Trump’s soiled work. However on the opposite facet of those sham prosecutions, authorized superstars are lining up for the defendants.
Good luck, Lindsey. You’ll want it.
