President Donald Trump's hand-picked prosecutor overseeing the charges against former FBI Director James Comey has rapidly turned the case into a "comedy of errors," former litigator and conservative analyst David French wrote in a scathing analysis for The New York Times published Thursday.
This comes after a bombshell revelation that acting U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan never properly let the grand jury review the second indictment brought against Comey — a blunder that could ultimately get the case thrown out.
"I never witnessed the level of legal incompetence that we are witnessing from the Trump administration," wrote French, a longtime critic of the president. Among other things, he noted, the magistrate judge found this week "that the prosecutors had mishandled attorney-client communications between Comey and one of his former lawyers, Daniel Richman, who is a law professor at Columbia Law School and a personal friend of Comey’s" — which means Halligan violated a "sacred" tenet of the legal process.
Meanwhile, "The magistrate also raised concerns about whether the Trump F.B.I. 'complied with a fundamental requirement of the Fourth Amendment' when it executed the Richman search," and "when grand jurors challenged Halligan on the strength of the evidence against Comey, Halligan responded with a 'fundamental and highly prejudicial misstatement of the law that suggests to the grand jury that Mr. Comey does not have a Fifth Amendment right not to testify at trial.'"
It follows confusion around the grand jury reviewing the second indictment which, French noted, was itself a massive blow, with the judge saying, “If this procedure did not take place, then the court is in uncharted legal territory in that the indictment returned in open court was not the same charging document presented to and deliberated upon by the grand jury.”
The magistrate judge has not yet made a move to dismiss the case, but, French wrote, that appears to be only part of Halligan's worries now.
"We do not yet know if Halligan’s procedural irregularities will be fatal to the case, but I do know that if I’d committed that level of malpractice when I was litigating, it would have been instantly fatal to my continued employment," he concluded.