'A very, very big deal': Legal expert flags Trump DOJ move as the 'height of misconduct'
MS NOW's Lisa Rubin reacted to interim U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan's stunning admission that could blow up the case against former FBI Director James Comey and identified additional questions about the prosecution.
President Donald Trump's hand-picked federal prosecutor admitted the full grand jury had not seen the indictment before it was handed up against Comey, and she flagged additional evidence that called into question the validity of the charges in the case.
"This is a very, very big deal," Rubin told host Ana Cabrera. "We knew that something had gone awry with respect to the presentation to the grand jury, based on Judge [William] Fitzpatrick's decision the other day, you and I were talking this morning about the fact that Judge Fitzpatrick had sort of said there were three categories of irregularities. One had to do with the use of evidence from old search warrants. One had to do with misstatements of the law that Lindsey Halligan had apparently made when she was before the grand jury, and the third had to do with the way in which the indictment was handed down and a gap in recordings of the grand jury proceedings themselves."
"What Judge Fitzpatrick had said at that time was there were only seven minutes between when Lindsey Halligan said in an affidavit that she was handing the three-count indictment, that the grand jury refused to return a true bill on, meaning they had refused one of the counts," Rubin added.
The judge found that Halligan had returned with an amended indictment far too quickly for it to have been properly corrected.
"When the hearing started before another magistrate judge in the district, Lindsey Vaala, at which the grand jury presented the two-count indictment with which Jim Comey has been charged, and Judge Fitzpatrick said in his decision, something here doesn't add up either," Rubin said. "Miss Halligan is mistaken as to the timing, or something went awry in the grand jury, because seven minutes is not enough time to present an indictment all over again to a grand jury, meaning if they refuse the first indictment, you don't have enough time in seven minutes to then present the second indictment, the one that was returned, the one that was charged against Comey to everyone here."
Halligan admitted during Wednesday's hearing that only two grand jurors saw the three-count indictment that was ultimately handed up.
"We now know the answer to that mystery, which was that the full grand jury never saw that indictment," Rubin said. "That is the height of prosecutorial misconduct. It is a basis in and of itself for the dismissal of this case. There is a reason that there was stunned silence in the courtroom."
Comey's team had filed a motion to dismiss the case as "selective and vindictive," and Rubin said Halligan's admission gave even more powerful evidence to end the prosecution.
"The question about grand jury misconduct is a motion that hasn't even been made yet by Jim Comey's legal team," Rubin said. "Why? Because up until a couple of days ago, they were even fighting for the evidence to support that motion. They had an instinct that something had gone wrong in the grand jury. Where does that instinct come from? It comes from the transcript of the return of the indictment in the first place. That is a transcript that we obtained, and it shows Lindsey Halligan handing simultaneously to that magistrate judge two signed instruments, and the magistrate judge says to her, sort of which of these two is the actual charging document here, and she says, 'Oh, I didn't sign both of them.' That very confusion was the tip-off to Jim Comey's team that something had gone wrong and they followed their instincts."
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