'As basic as they come': Legal expert mocks 'slow death' of the James Comey prosecution

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance was more than amused at how badly the prosecution of FBI Director James Comey began on Wednesday, saying prosecutors were thrust into an unwinnable position and did not help themselves by professing ignorance before the judge.

In her column on Substack, Vance, now a University of Alabama School of Law professor, noted that prosecutors Gabriel J. Diaz and Nathaniel Tyler Lemons were recruited from their jobs in North Carolina because newly appointed U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan could not convince anyone in her Virginia office to present the case.

As she explained, the case now faces a “slow death” in a court known for speed.

“The prosecutors who are taking over the case from Trump’s never-before-prosecuted-a-case U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan in the Eastern District of Virginia were dropped in from the Eastern District of North Carolina, and it’s not clear they understood they had landed in the Eastern District of Virginia’s notorious ‘rocket docket,’” she wrote before pointing out they immediately asked for an extension to delay discovery since they were unprepared.

Asserting that Department of Justice doesn’t want a speedy trial, Vance wrote, Halligan’s team “tried to explain to the judge, telling him that the case is complicated.”

“It’s not,” Vance wrote.

“A false statements case is about as basic as they come,” she elaborated. “Prosecutors must prove the statement was made by the defendant, that it was false and the defendant knew it was false, and that it was material or important to the outcome of the government proceeding in which it was made.”

District Judge Michael Nachmanoff also made that clear to the DOJ’s team by telling them, “This does not appear to me to be an overly complicated case.”

“Everything is building towards the two motions the defense said it expected to file, one to dismiss the cases because Halligan, the only prosecutor to sign the indictment, wasn’t properly appointed to office, so the indictment is fatally flawed,” she wrote before adding, “A second motion will charge some species of selective and/or vindictive prosecution. That latter motion in particular keeps looking better and better.”

Writing, “The defense has a strong argument that the president’s personal dislike of Comey led to the prosecution, especially after longtime prosecutors rejected it because they didn’t have evidence,” she concluded, “The case is going to be a challenge for prosecutors at trial if the case manages to get that far.”

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