'Problems with the indictment': Legal expert flags 'unusual' revelations about Comey case

The federal indictment filed against former FBI Director James Comey is looking more and more like it will crash and burn as more details become public.

That is according to former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance who wrote about it on her Substack platform and in a piece for the Brennan Center for Justice.

According to the attorney, who co-hosts the Sisters In Law podcast, the initial filing that was presented to a grand jury in Virginia was slim on details and that way more information that has been doled out since then is “unusual” in the extreme.

On Substack she wrote, “Normally, you read an indictment and you know up front what the defendant is being charged with. In fact, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure require the indictment to be a plain statement of the crime or crimes, and due process prohibits trial by surprise,“ adding, “For the first 24 hours after the indictment became public, there was a widespread assumption that the false statement the government accused former FBI Director of making involved Andy McCabe, his number two at the Bureau, and whether he’d authorized him to be an anonymous source. Then came reporting that McCabe was never interviewed by prosecutors during the investigation and didn’t testify before the grand jury.”

Calling what was presented against Comey was “vague or deficient,” she claimed it was not surprising that former insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan, newly appointed to her U.S. attorney position, barely got indictments on two of the three charges she presented.

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As the former prosecutor put it, “I suppose, that the government has evidence here that we are unaware of. It’s also possible that it was a mistake for an insurance lawyer who has never been a prosecutor or indicted a case to handle this one.”

Add to that, as she wrote for the Brennan Center, the high bar needed for a conviction in a trial appears to be out of Halligan’s reach.

"In Comey’s case, even the grand jury vote on that low burden of proof was close. Federal grand juries consist of 23 grand jurors. It takes 12 votes to obtain an indictment. We don’t know how many grand jurors were present during the session when Comey was indicted. But only 14 of them voted in favor of indicting on the two counts on which they returned charges,” she explained before pointing out, “Such a slender margin is unusual.”

“The absence of consensus does not bode well for prosecutors who must establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt — a much higher standard than what is required to indict — by a unanimous jury vote at trial,” she explained. “In the grand jury, the defense has no opportunity to tell its side of the story. At trial, the defense’s legal team will have the opportunity to poke holes in the government’s case and present evidence and argument on their client’s behalf."